


Lovesick

by Ludwiggle73



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Angst, Concerts, Drama & Romance, Drug Abuse, F/M, Fame, Friendship, Gay Sex, Guitars, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, POV First Person, Past Drug Addiction, Post-Break Up, Punk England (Hetalia), Self-Destruction, Singing, Song Lyrics, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 06:47:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 58,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15431346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ludwiggle73/pseuds/Ludwiggle73
Summary: Fresh out of rehab, Arthur Kirkland is ready to get his life back to normal—or, at least, as normal as a rockstar’s life can be. He’s supposed to be sober now . . . but everyone knows love can be a drug. He might have a new lease on life, but the withdrawal of a lovesick heart could very well be the end of him.[PortEng. Past FrUK. Frain. DenNor. PruCan.](Nyo!France.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been dying to write this (Punk!England AND PortEng, hallelujah!) for ages, so let's have a crack at it, shall we?  
> Hope y'all enjoy :D

Once, this was my life: _Budding singer/songwriter Arthur Kirkland and his post-hardcore group, the Fail Brothers Band, prove their name to be at least a third misleading as their first single makes itself at home in the Top 20._

This was also my life: _FBB frontman Arthur Kirkland survives devastating car crash._

And this: _Another case of rockstar rehab - Arthur Kirkland admitted today, for alcohol and illegal drug abuse._

Now, this was what I wanted my life to be: My fingertips on guitar strings. My band behind me. My fans in front of me. My heart beating back at me through the summer’s speakers.

Or, in other words:

_Ladies and gentlemen, Arthur Kirkland is back._

 

* * *

 

“There he is! Come here, Kirkland!”

I allowed Gilbert to pull me into a very _bro_ hug, complete with back-slap and four inches of space between the naughty bits (which was admittedly rather necessary in jeans this tight). Rehab had softened me; there was plenty of hugging (and crying and vomiting) among those desperate for drugs, but nothing like this. I felt like a rag doll getting crushed to Gilbert’s chest—which was, for God’s sake, even firmer than the last time I’d felt it.

“Stop lifting weights,” I told him as I pulled back. “You’re a hideous bulging veiny monster who frightens children.”

“That’s Ludwig you’re thinking of.” Gilbert grinned at me as we started across the parking lot, eyes hidden by a huge pair of aviator sunglasses. “So, how’s it feel to be free?”

“Humid.” I shifted my shoulders; the strap of my duffel bag was digging in. Gilbert used to say I’d end up with one shoulder lower than the other from my guitar, but so far there was no such issue. “Is the AC still broken in your car?”

“Yep, afraid so. But the windows work.”

“I hate everything.”

Bag in the boot, we pulled onto the road and quickly left the rehab centre far behind. I rolled all the windows down, put my feet up on the dash, and turned on the radio. A Taylor Swift song bleated out at me, and I immediately turned it back off again. “What the _fuck_.”

Gilbert didn’t look away from the road. “What?”

“You were listening to _pop music._ ”

“It wasn’t me—”

“Oh, right, like Mick listens to that shite.” I turned the volume back up and scrolled until I found an old rock station. “Bloody hell. Speaking of Mick, where is he?”

“At home, with Bjorn, probably. That’s where he usually is these days.”

“Disgusting. Have you two done any writing? I have a few little somethings to chew on.”

Something was absent from Gilbert’s voice now, levity fading. “Yeah, about that.”

 _Oh._ I’d forgotten what dread felt like. There was some good news, I hadn’t destroyed that part of my brain. “What now?”

Gilbet’s lips pressed flat for a moment. “I don’t think Bjorn wants Mick to be in the band.”

“Oh, that.” I relaxed against the seat, dismissive. “He never has.”

Bjorn wasn’t a fan, at all. He didn’t like rock music—who doesn’t like rock music? bloody serial killers, that’s who—and he didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t party. Apparently Mick met him in line at a convenience store, on a last-minute run for snacks before we headed out to our next gig one tour. Bjorn hadn’t heard of us, and Mick must have thought that was refreshing or something, because next thing I knew the pair of them were fondling each other across from me and Gil in a restaurant booth and I had to pretend to appreciate the contributions of Norwegian folk to music at large. _Jesus._

“No, but he’s serious this time,” Gilbert told me. “You’ll see.”

“You sound worried.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Do you really think that little Nordic twink can keep us from recording?”

Now Gilbert’s lips twisted. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for a twink to call someone else a twink in such a disparaging way.”

“Nobody asked you.” I smacked his ridiculous toned shoulder. “And I’m not a twink, you prick, I’m fucking _svelte_.”

Gilbert laughed. I’d forgotten how good it felt to make people laugh. Rehab Lady: _Life is a drug. It makes you feel bad, but it makes you feel great, too. We have to find those great moments and cherish them._ And all I could think:  _If life is a drug, what happens if I OD?_

Rehab was a little too wholesome for me, to be honest.

 

* * *

 

Bjorn had one of those faces that pissed me off just looking at it. Something about how calm and held-together he always seemed made me feel like his very existence was a criticism of me. That, and his skin was white and smooth and perfect, the bastard.

“I don’t see what the issue is here,” I said, holding out my hands in what felt like a very diplomatic gesture. Gilbert had gone inside to talk to Mikkel, and Bjorn had come outside for a civil conversation on the hood of Gilbert’s POS car. “We just want to record music. To entertain the public.”

Bjorn looked at my hands, one of which was covered in tattoos, the other of which had a fingerless black glove on it. (Normally the nails would be black, too, but you can probably imagine nail polish and remover for said polish is not allowed in a rehab centre.) Bjorn’s dark blue gaze lifted to my face. “I don’t have an issue with recording. It’s the touring I don’t like. I don’t think it’s a good idea for any of you to go on tour.”

“Why? Touring is how we make our fans happy. And how we make money.”

“Yes, but it’s also how you get worn down and how you find drugs. I’ve heard some of the stories. You’re a bad influence for Mick.”

“Okay, I resent _that_. He’s gotten me into bad situations in the past, too. I bet he hasn’t told you those stories.”

“Yes, he has. Some of them, anyway. As I said, I don’t think it’s good for anyone.”

Fucking sensible people. “I think we should ask him what he thinks.”

Bjorn gave a _very well_ shrug and led me into the house. Mikkel was standing on top of a table—normal-sized people would have to source a ladder to reach the ceiling of this kitchen—and was having a lively negotiation with a light bulb and its fixture. He said something in Danish that I was fairly sure meant _son of an English whore_ and Gilbert’s chortle confirmed my suspicion.

“Don’t swear in this pleasant household,” I said. I was being sarcastic, but it really was a nice house. Everything was clean, even the floor, and it smelled vaguely of something baking at all times, and there was a rack with different kinds of spices on it. A house for a magazine, which probably made sense, considering Bjorn wrote articles for one. _Tips for Spring Cleaning. How to Do Easter Ham Right. Five Typical Household Objects You’d Never Think Could Stimulate Your Prostate._

Mikkel turned, half a smile tugging at his mouth. It might have seemed like I was being cheated of a full smile, but his mouth was big enough that half a smile was bigger than a normal person’s complete offering. “Hey, Art. They let you out, huh?”

I hooked my thumbs into my pockets. “Yep. Can’t be caged, and all that. You feel like making magic?”

That phrase was enough to take the three of us back; I could see it in Mikkel and Gilbert’s faces. Normally their gazes were sharp—they wouldn’t be in my band if they didn’t burn the same fire as me—but now they softened, remembering all the times I’d said those five words. The first time the doors of a tour bus opened to a tunnel of shrieking fans. The first time we stood in a recording booth. The first time I brought my guitar to Gilbert’s garage. _Feel like making magic, lads?_

“Of course I do,” Mikkel replied. One hand was still on the light bulb above his head, because he was pretending to forget about it so he could show off his bloody bicep. Bjorn was pretending not to admire it. Once, it would’ve put me in a bad mood, but after a decade I was immune to all parts of Mikkel and Gilbert’s bodies. “Do you have to ask?”

I smiled smugly at Bjorn. “Nope, I don’t.”

Bjorn’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly, but he either lacked the spine to fight me, or he had the spine but wanted to maintain his good posture. _Fucking_ sensible people. He looked up at Mikkel. “I won’t tell you what to do, Mick. But I think you should really consider this. Every part of it.”

Mikkel looked down at Bjorn, a question on his face. They had a silent conversation with quirking eyebrows and twisting lips that ended with Mikkel’s shoulders tipping back and a soft-toned promise of, “We’ll talk about this later.” Then he wrenched the bulb free and traded it for a fresh one from Gilbert. Bulb in, he hopped down from the table. Once we were all sure the world was still more or less steady on its axis, Mikkel and Gilbert looked at me expectantly. A look I had seen many a time. A look that, if I could melt it down and inject into my veins, would give me a better high than anything I’d gone to rehab for.

I took the old bulb from Gilbert and smashed it into the rubbish bin, just to hear the glory of something that wasn’t me being shattered. “Gentlemen, let’s go make some noise, shall we?”

 

* * *

 

Two albums ago, I’d started writing a song about going home. I hadn’t considered a title for it, but in retrospect the title probably would have been _You Can’t Go Home._ Cliche, but most of the shite I wrote back then was. ( _The Fail Brothers Band should really consider a name change if they’re going to keep offering us trite like their latest album. It’s just a bit too on the nose for my tastes._ Who doesn’t love snarky music journalists? Everyone, that’s fucking who.)

Anyway, it wasn’t as painful as that aborted song described, but it was rather strange to be crossing the threshold of my home; first the iron gate, then the front door. The floors squeaked under my shoes; the Ukrainian maid I could never remember the name of had done a fine job of keeping everything shiny in my absence. I wasn’t the type of rockstar who kept artistic representations of himself all over the house, but I was the type of rockstar who had a giant neon red guitar on the wall of his foyer. It was the first thing you saw when you walked in—just so nobody got the wrong idea of what they were in for.

“Such trash,” Gilbert said fondly, looking up at the guitar.

“Ol’ faithful,” Mikkel agreed.

“Neither of you have taste.”

I sort of wanted to have a full round of the place with them, but it would be pretty childish to ask them to accompany me on a memory tour of my own house, so I just headed straight for the studio. It wasn’t decked out with the latest tech like Kiku’s place was—we’d be heading there to record the album, and even the thought of that had my skin prickling with excitement—but it had decent acoustics and a resident drum kit so Gilbert didn’t have to drag his kitchen sink to and fro just to rough out a song.

Mikkel set down his case on one of the leather couches and flicked open the latches. Just that, the sound of metal clasps coming loose, made my heart shiver. A decade of doing this, and after only a year away, I was desperate for a fix.

An interviewer asked me once: _Let me ask the question every writer gets asked eventually. Why do you write, in your case, music? Songs?_

I’d replied: _Because if I didn’t, I’d be dead._

True, in a roundabout and oversimplified way. If I’d been really honest, I would’ve said something along the lines of: _I write songs so I can bleed in front of people and they can show me their oozing wounds and know they’re not alone._ But that was pretty melodramatic for an afternoon radio show.

Against the right wall, next to the mini fridge, a guitar rack stretched itself out. It held nine guitars, every soldier I’d ever fought with lined up for me. Black-and-red, white-and-red. Blue, brown. My fingertips brushed over the strings of the guitar at the far end of the rack, so beaten and worn you could hardly tell it was painted with a Union Jack. _Steady on, lad._ Then I reached for the all-black, slinging the strap over my shoulder.

“Black Beauty,” Gilbert remarked, sitting at his drums and picking up his sticks by the shoulders. The last time he held his drumsticks properly, he’d stabbed the tip right through a drum head. He’d pounded the hell out of his drums with the arse-ends of the sticks ever since.

Mikkel didn’t look up from tuning his bass. “I thought we weren’t doing any more love songs.”

I strummed, just once, a flick across the strings. Without an amp, their snarl was bitter and brittle, something that made you want to bare your teeth. “Who told you that?”

“You did,” Mikkel and Gilbert replied in unison.

“Oh.” I rolled my shoulders, adjusting the strap. “Well, whatever. This isn’t a love song.”

Mikkel nodded wisely. “A fuck song?”

By way of answer, I gave him the wandering thread of chords I’d been toying with over the past few weeks. It didn’t sound exactly like I wanted to, and it was messy and unborn, but it was lilting and jagged and it was not at all hard to imagine my vocals curling around it, twining like lovers’ limbs.

Mikkel considered it with a thoughtful look, head cocked, then nodded. “I can work with that.”

Gilbert grinned. “I can hear the fangirls now.” He flipped his drumsticks in the air, then beat out the bridge of _Au Naturel_ , which was a song I’d heard so many times it had not only lost any personal meaning but also I was annoyed that it existed and was catchier than a lot of songs I’d written since then, not to mention it just reminded me of—

Mikkel lunged into the bass riff of the song, throbbing with need. If the drums were the bones and the bass was the heartbeat, this was desperate palpitations. It longed. It _ached_. It got down on its gorgeous knees and _begged me_ to sing.

So, of course, I sang.

_Don’t want Americana, blond babe bombshell_

_Don’t want Britannia, classy lady hard sell_

_I want you en français, vis-à-vis, ma belle fille_

Gilbert’s laugh snuck through the sound, drums like headboards against the wall. Hearing my own delight pouring out from him—God, it had been too long. If I had been getting sick of this before, that was a distant, forgotten feeling. I’d thought it might be awkward, getting back to the intimacy of making music together, but I needn’t have worried. These bastards were my brothers. This was the truth of us.

The drums dropped to a steady, insistent beat for the chorus. Black Beauty and Mikkel’s bass circled each other and clashed, again and again, rising higher and higher.

_No shirt no shoes no bullshit_

_No skirt love just lose all of it_

I imagined myself onstage, hips in sync with the drums, girls reaching for me, screaming, _howling_ the words along with me, some of them almost bursting from their torn clothes, offering me their love and money and virginity, pledging undying devotion. Infatuation, the cruel mistress. But there was an even crueler bitch, waiting for me backstage, a girl who wouldn’t scream, wouldn’t sing along even though she damn well knew the words just as well as I did because they were written for her.

_I want you mademoiselle_

_God I want you au naturel_

I stopped strumming, because only half of my heart was in it now, distracted by the memory. Mikkel’s bass, with nothing to compete against, faded out. Gilbert looped his notes, then stopped. They both looked at me, waiting, their excited energy stalled, suspended above the three of us.

I gave them as much of a smile as I could manage, just a play to my lips—which also would’ve made fangirls scream, by the way. “Not too rusty, then, eh?”

They relaxed a little, both of them smiling. Relieved, probably, I wasn’t giving in to dark thoughts and running out to dunk my head into a bucket of heroin. If I was going to break that easily, I’d still be in that bloody centre. I was sober. I’d spent a very long time being not sober, and I’d had quite enough of that. New Arthur Kirkland was afoot. I could sing a new fuck song if I wanted to. I could even write a new love song, if I wanted to.

I just didn’t have anyone to write it for.

 

* * *

 

For the next five hours, we worked. Work was a loose term for it. It was some extending the chords I’d been thinking about, some experimenting, some filling out with drums, some Mikkel absorbing our progress and scribbling out potential riffs on the big white board that took up most of the left wall. But it was also a lot of playing old songs, combining choruses of our loudest songs and laughing at how an unamplified Black Beauty turned deliriously angry anthems into the scratchy ravings of an old hag, throwing snatches of music at each other and tossing others back, and drawing a lot of dicks on the smaller white board that took up half of the right wall. I didn’t share any lyric ideas with them, and we didn’t end up with anything concrete, but it was the first step toward creation and I was beyond relieved to be on the journey again.

It didn’t occur to me that it would end, but after those five hours were over, Mikkel put his bass back into its case. “The time has come.”

“Yeah, about time to head out,” Gilbert agreed, standing up and stretching his arms over his head.

“I’m going to ban both of you from lifting your arms above ninety degrees.” I returned the black guitar, reluctantly, to its space on the rack. “What’s so important you have to go to, Densen?”

“Uh, dinner?” Mikkel raised an eyebrow at me. “You’re familiar with eating things that aren’t pills, right?”

“Mick,” Gilbert said, hands in his pockets. Only a few degrees of authority shy of a scolding father.

I narrowed my eyes, for just a moment. It would be quite easy to get into a shouting match with Mikkel right now; all it would take is a few jabs at how he used to do drugs right along with me, how I seemed to recall it was _him_ who wanted to try weed first, not me. Then, if he was still holding back, an unflattering remark about Bjorn would have him swinging. I considered the rush of fighting, fists and blood. A drug, like anything else: good in the moment, a pain in the arse the next morning. I let my breath out. No need to start a conflict with a chap. No need to dig up bad vibes. I could be a functioning adult if I felt like it.

“Right, dinner,” I said, in a mostly not-flat voice. “What’s Bjorn cooking? Something wholesome and Norwegian, I presume.”

Mikkel kept his eyebrow raised, but he was smiling now. “Sandwiches, probably. Nothing too filling. Gil said there’d be plenty of snacks at the party.”

“Party?” I turned to Gilbert. “What party would that be?”

“A surprise party,” said Gilbert through his teeth, eyes narrowed at Mikkel.

“Oops,” Mikkel said, barely guilty.

Of course, Gilbert wasn’t actually angry; he was the most harmless of us all, even though he looked like the one most likely to stab you in a laundromat. Red eyes and silver hair didn’t exactly shout _LOVABLE BUNNY RABBIT_ to the world; perhaps that’s why he acted goofy so often. “I thought I’d throw you a party, you know, to celebrate being clean. At my place, at nine o’clock. Ludwig and Feli will be there, and Lovino and Laura and Lars.”

“The L Brigade,” Mikkel said, amused, snapping the clasps on his case and lifting it up.

I didn’t smile, but I offered a fist. “Well, thanks, mate.”

Gilbert bumped it, exploding his fist into wiggly fingers. “Cheers, bruv.”

“Oi. Fucking cultural appropriation, that.”

Outside, I watched Mikkel get into the passenger seat, but before Gilbert could slide into the driver’s side, I hooked my arms over the top of his door. “You’re not dining with the Scandinavians, are you?”

Gilbert looked surprised. “Uh, no. Why?”

“Well.” I tugged at my glove. “I mean, we could get a pizza or something. I thought. It’s been awhile since I ate anything with grease, I miss it.”

Gilbert seemed to be considering something, and I wondered if he was imagining my evening spent here, alone in a huge house, ordering take-away delivered because I had no way go to get it myself short of calling a cab. And if I was taking a taxi somewhere, who knows, maybe I’d stop halfway to my destination and get something a little more satisfying than fish and chips. I wouldn’t, obviously, but that was the mindset I’d let my friends adopt when I went over the deep end. The opposite of the boy who cried wolf, guilty before proven innocent. _There’s a song in there somewhere, I bet._

Gilbert’s expression cleared, finally, and he nodded. “Yeah, we can do that. Sure. Let him in, Mick.”

Mikkel got out so I could join his bass in the backseat, and we listened to the rerun rock station on the way to Mikkel’s and then Gilbert’s house, but it never played any of our songs. Gilbert’s house was almost totally unchanged from when I’d been in it last, though it smelled nicer and the couches had new cushions, one of which was adorned with a bright red maple leaf. (I raised an eyebrow at Gilbert, but he barely glanced away from his phone. _Oh. Yeah. It was on sale._ Of course it was.) We ordered two pizzas, one of which he insisted on plaguing with mushrooms and olives, and we drank soda without alcohol in it, and we watched shitty music videos and mini-documentaries and our old promo clips and YouTube compilations of me ( _Arthur Kirkland Screaming For 6 Minutes, every fbb song but it’s just the word fuck, Art Kirkland Best Moments_ ). I kept remembering how good it felt to be back in the studio with the band, and I kept realizing how nice it was to just be in this moment, living life, having fun. For the first time in months, I didn’t feel so restless inside my skin. I felt at home. _God,_  I thought, _it’s good to be back._

And then _she_ had to show up.


	2. Chapter 2

I didn’t like parties.

Actually, I did like parties. Parties just didn’t like me. I used to hate them, when I was never invited, but once I got to the point where people would show up to parties if they knew I was coming, I looked forward to them. A night wasn’t a _night_ if it didn’t end in getting smashed with Mikkel and Gilbert and thirty-or-more new friends—because of course they were friends, always friends when you were a loud, emotional drunk like me.

It was just that eventually, at some point during that night, I would get sad. It was inevitable. No matter how drunk or high or low I was, no matter how many people were laughing and singing and kissing around me, I would become apart. I would realize the madness of this, of existing on their couch or in this yard or on that roof. Something would splinter inside me, and I would fracture away from the happy vibes of the room; their force field of blissful oblivion would reject me so completely that I had no choice, simply no choice. If I was sad, clearly I needed to get more drunk. Or more high. Or more low, so I sunk down below everybody, down into my own deep dark hell of quiet solitude.

So I liked the idea of parties, and Gilbert’s party was essentially that, but definitely toned down. There were no drugs here, not even coffee. They were drinking soda and juice (Lars was drinking water because his body was a temple) and eating crackers and cheese and little bits of meat on toothpicks that seemed suspiciously fancy by Beilschmidt standards. “Just something I saw on Pinterest,” Gilbert explained, popping one in his mouth.

“Since when are you on _Pinterest_?” I demanded, shocked at the injustice that no one else in the room was shocked. I’d been gone for the better part of a year, but that didn’t mean I was a stranger to my friends. I still knew them. We just had some catching up to do.

Gilbert’s eyes widened a little, and he swallowed before he replied, “I dunno. A while.”

I shook my head, sipping orange juice that wasn’t nearly sour enough to give me anything like a buzz and would have been so much better with vodka but it was totally fine that it had no vodka in it because I was clean and I didn’t need vodka and I didn’t even want it, nope not at all. “You’re madhouse material, mate. Pop and Pinterest? What’s become of you?”

Sat on Gilbert’s other side, Mikkel leaned to look at me with oddly serious eyes. “People change, Art.”

Vodka sounded really, really good, come to think of it. My stomach twisted. “No need to be fickle.”

“It’s not fickle. It’s called maturity—”

“Mick. Seriously.” Gilbert flashed him a look I barely caught, but the intensity of its disapproval was impressive. “This party is to celebrate Art getting cleaned up. Let’s just forgive and forget, alright?” He raised his glass of root beer, passing his smile around the room before at last giving it to me. “To leaving the past behind.”

On his other side, Mikkel’s expression faltered for a moment, then formed itself into a smile as he raised his glass. I could see that he still wanted to argue with me, but this smiling wasn’t forced—he was genuinely happy I wasn’t destroying myself anymore. _He’s a good person,_ I thought. _It’s just that you aren’t, and that’s where the clash happens._

Laura, Lars, Ludwig, Feli, Lovi all raised their glasses at me. I had no choice; I tugged at one side of my mouth until it resembled a smile and lifted my orange juice. “Cheers, all.”

 

* * *

 

Then came the interview session of the party. None of them had seen me for the past year or so; they’d visited me in the hospital, but in rehab I’d chosen to go without visitors from my real life based on the advice of my roommate, a man who’d snorted holes in his sinuses and never stopped twitching, even in his sleep. This was his second stint in rehab, and this time he was determined not to relapse. _Purge it all,_ he told me. _Get rid of everything from your life when you were addicted. The friends, the house, the car. Even the clothes. Change everything, that’s what I’m doing. Don’t give yourself an inch, or sooner or later you’ll be right back at it._ I didn’t think I was quite that bad, but I could understand the sentiment, especially now. Sitting round with these people brought me right back to a time when I’d have a cigarette between my fingers, fingers that were wrapped around a bottle of beer or scotch or gin. It reminded me of how much easier it was to face people, even friends, when I had something to muffle things. That’s what it seemed like, back then: the drugs were just Styrofoam, to soften the landing if I fucked up and fell. In truth, they only made me fall harder. The power of retrospect.

“How does it feel to be clean?” Laura asked me. “Is your head clearer?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “But when it’s my head, that’s not really a good thing.”

Feliciano laughed. So did Laura, hesitantly. It wasn’t a joke, but whatever.

“How was the food?” Feliciano asked. “Did they have pasta?”

“They did, actually. They had macaroni and cheese.” Like cement. If you flipped the bowl over, it stayed right in there. No worry of spillage. The noodles were whole wheat, apparently. They tasted like utter shite to me, so probably they were really healthy.

“How is your leg?” Ludwig asked.

Now everybody got quiet. I saw six pairs of eyes bounce off me, trying to find something else to look at despite being overly aware of me. Gilbert was trying to use his disapproving look on Ludwig, but his brother was immune. What worked on a rockstar did not work on a marine. Ludwig had faced much worse than any hardship I thought I’d dealt with, and I had to respect him for that whether I wanted to or not. Plus, he was straightforward—not in the _I’m being direct so you’ll be thrown off-guard and notice how clever I am_ way, but in the _I’m not going to waste your time or mine on social frills_ way.

“It’s fine now,” I said. God, I sounded like a younger me, talking head-bowed to my father. The Dark Days. _(What kind of man wears makeup what is wrong with you bloody poof not under my roof.)_ “Just a scar. About as ugly as the rest of me.”

Laura said, “Oh, Arthur, stop,” and Lars’s mouth quirked. Then he asked, “Did you get an estimate on the repair? Of the car?”

I squinted at the ceiling, trying to recall. “Eh . . . Something like $30,000.”

Five different languages swore at me. Lars shook his head, face longer than normal at the thought of the wasted money. I empathized with that face; I’d worn it, myself, for five months after I wrecked the car. They’d offered to get it fixed up for me, said all I had to do was pay the money and they’d sort it all out. (Back when I was famous enough to have people at my beck and call. Rehab had turned me into a ghost.) But I didn’t want the car repaired. I didn’t even want it sold for parts. I wanted it crushed flat, chopped up, buried deep. I wanted every memory I had of that car incinerated. Too many of them were fingers overlapping on gear shifts and fogged windows and playing my songs so loudly she thought I couldn’t hear her singing the words—

I wouldn’t even drink the vodka. You weren’t guarunteed to die from eyeball shots, right?

“What I wanna know is,” Lovino said, crossing his ankles on the coffee table, “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

I stared at him. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

He rolled his eyes. “Drugs.”

“Oh.” I considered. Everybody and their babysitter drank, so not alcohol. Not weed, definitely not weed. Cocaine wasn’t world-destroying. Contrary to popular belief, I’d never actually done meth; cocaine took me high enough until I stopped being interested in going up. Heroin was down, deep dark down. Fucking ugly, horrible, disgusting withdrawal. That was the worst thing I’d done, wasn’t it? But then again, it was a team effort of alcohol and coke that totaled my car. And then I remembered. “Acid.”

That seemed to surprise the room, even Gilbert and Mikkel. “Why acid?” Feliciano asked, twining his fingers with Ludwig’s. (A tiny, barely noticeable twinge in a far corner of my heart. Not envy, not jealousy. Just a reminder of _Nope, still don’t have that. Shame, yeah?_ )

“Bad trip?” Laura asked, with a mix of sympathy and exasperation only she and probably Liz could pull off.

“Because I only dropped it once,” I told Feli. “And I didn’t just have a bad trip, I had a terrible trip.”

Beside me, Gilbert was carefully creating a cheese-and-cracker sandwich. Mikkel elbowed him. “You were there, weren’t you, Gil? You tripped.”

Gilbert stuffed his little sandwich in his mouth and said, very muffled, “I dunno what you’re talking about.”

“Okay, I want to hear this story now,” Lovino said, leaning forward intently.

“So do I,” Ludwig said, raising an eyebrow slightly at his brother.

Before Gilbert could protest, his phone chimed where he’d left it in the kitchen. His brow furrowed a little, and he got up, saying, “Art, tell the story tastefully, for the love of God.”

I wasn’t sure how possible that was, but I figured I’d give it a try. Of course, I wasn’t going to sacrifice entertainment value. A rockstar couldn’t just _not_ entertain people. “So Gilbert and I got hold of some acid”—someone offered it to me at a party and I saved it for later—“and we figured we’d see what the fuss is about. Cut to ten minutes later, when I’m sitting on the floor in the corner and he’s wandering around, touching the walls and taking his clothes off.” I’d been hoping the acid might bring back the imaginary friends who’d kept me company as a child, but that sure as hell didn’t happen. “Everything had this weird texture over it. It was like things were . . . rippling? And fuzzy. My eyes were just fucked. And I felt paranoid as all hell.”

“Why?” Feliciano asked, eyes wide. As far as I knew, he’d never done anything worse than weed brownies, and event that was by accident.

I shrugged. “Just what it did to me. I don’t even know what I thought was going to happen, but I was sure at any moment the world was going to end.”

Maybe that was telling. I’d thought the world was going to end, and all I could do was hide in the corner. Only after the bad trip had I found out about things like _cosmic annihilation_ , which had been a major contributing factor in my decision to never touch LSD again.

“Wait, why did Gilbert get naked?” Lovino asked, bewildered.

Gilbert came back over to the couch, phone in his hand, but he didn’t sit. “Art—”

“Oh, relax. He said he wanted to see what a shower would feel like. Apparently it was profound.”

“It was,” Gilbert admitted. “Art, listen—”

“Sit down, the story’s over. Unless you want me to tell them about—”

“ _No_ —”

“What?” Lovino demanded.

“He had an in-depth conversation about the interconnectedness of all things with the ceiling fan in the hotel room,” I replied.

Lovino and Laura laughed, Ludwig and Lars shook their heads, and Mikkel and Feliciano sipped their drinks in amusement—but all were interrupted when the doorbell rang. All of us turned to look, even though none of us could see whoever might be out there. I raised an eyebrow at Gilbert.

“Come in!” he called, then shrugged helplessly at me. “I tried to warn you.”

The door opened.

Antonio and Marianne stepped into the house.

She was wearing a black halter top, a triangle of fabric that flowed down from a strap round her neck. An inch of skin peeked over the top of her leggings. Her hair was bobbed, curling under her chin. Soft pink lipstick, just a bit of makeup on her eyes; less than I wore on tour. There wasn’t a part of my body that didn’t know she was here, and not a single one knew what the fuck to do about it.

She looked at me.

She kept looking at me.

_Fuck._

She walked toward me.

_FUCK._

“Hello, Arthur,” she said.

I couldn’t do anything. I stood up. Why the fuck did I stand up?

She’d been smiling politely, but that faltered now. “You don’t look happy to see me.”

Sarcasm swept in to save me: “Shock horror.”

She pressed her lips together, gave a tiny sharp exhale, then smiled again. “Well, I’m happy to see you.”

“Yeah?” I narrowed my eyes, tipping up my chin. “Why?”

She lifted her chin too (which meant I had to lower mine, goddamn it) and replied evenly, “I expected the next time I saw you, you would be in a casket. This is an improvement over that, don’t you think?”

I didn’t let myself consider my genuine answer to that question. “You wouldn’t be invited to my funeral.”

She met my gaze a moment longer, then shook her head, smile turning rueful. “You haven’t changed.”

I grimaced at her. “Neither have you.”

“Sorry to interrupt the happy reunion,” Antonio said, stepping beside Marianne. His gaze flicked over me—just a second, just long enough so I could see his distaste, like I wasn’t even worth the effort of full-on disgust—before finding Gilbert and turning infinitely friendlier. “My brother is coming.”

Marianne’s eyes were on me.

Gilbert shook his head, sitting beside Mikkel on the arm of the couch. “You guys still aren’t talking?”

She was judging me.

“Eh, it’s rocky. I thought we were on solid ground for a while, but since I got the deal without him—”

She thought I hadn’t changed? I was clean! She was the one who still looked at me like I was—

“Jealous?”

I whirled on Mikkel. “What did you just say?”

He stared at me like I was crazy. “I asked if Sebastião was jealous. What did you think I said?”

Gilbert was looking at me like I was crazy, too. So was everyone else. Including Marianne. Except she had something else in her eyes. Something shaped like pity.

My heart was beating too much. Too fast. I could feel a flush burning up the back of my neck. Vodka? Alcohol. Something. Something else, other than being here. I was going to lose my mind if I stayed here one second longer.

“I’ll be back,” I said, already halfway across the room. “I need some air.”

“Need company with it?” Gilbert called after me.

Yeah, right. Like he wanted to waste time with me when he could be sitting inside with his friends who were all functioning human beings. I just waved a hand that could have said _no thanks_ or _fuck off_ depending who you asked and shoved the garage door open then shut behind me. This wasn’t fresh air—far from it, musty and mechanical in fact—but that wasn’t really what I’d needed. I just had to be away from those fucking blue eyes.

This bloody garage. Gilbert’s old car squeezed between his old drum kit and his old couch. He kept everything—not because he was cheap like Lars, just because he was sentimental. _My car still works, why should I get a new one?_ Sensible, to a point. Just sensible enough for me to handle. Just sensible enough to keep me from going overboard, even if he did drop acid that one time. Nobody was perfect.

I dropped onto the couch. That was my mistake. The familiar give of the cushions and the exhausted breath they let out when my weight compressed them—that brought me back. It wasn’t in this garage, but it was this couch that we’d sat on when we named our band. I’d smoked my first joint on this couch.

I’d given Marianne my virginity on this godforsaken couch.

I leapt up, but it was too late. I could feel her lips smiling against mine, her thighs squeezing my waist, her nails digging into my back. The corduroy of the couch rubbing both of us red. Excitement, the same heart-shivering high I got when I hit a desperate note in a song and the crowd lost their fucking minds. Happy, _so_ happy, that someone actually wanted me.

I couldn’t take it. I tore open Gilbert’s tool box, grabbed a screw driver, and stabbed it into the couch. The cushion surrendered easily; it was so old, it was more than ready for death, the more destructive the better. _I know how that feels._ I hacked and ripped, imagining each memory on that couch was being destroyed with every gash I created. No more lips. No more thighs. No more youthful excitement. _Purge. Get rid of it all._

“You okay?”

I turned around, chest heaving. I’d never met Antonio’s brother, but this was definitely him. He looked like Antonio, but his hair was long and his face was marred with a beauty spot under his eye and a two rings in his nose—which was to say that he was far sexier than Antonio had any hope to be.

He raised an eyebrow, but not unkindly, and repeated, “You okay?”

I’d just been reunited with the woman who fucked a hole into my life, I was standing in a flurry of the guts of a couch, and I needed a stiff, _stiff_ drink.

“Yeah, I’m fucking superb,” I replied. My face was red, I could feel the heat of it. My whole body was burning. This was when bad things happened. Not even bad ideas, because I barely thought enough before I acted to call it an idea. _I’m just a fucking pinless grenade/hold on tight, love, let’s see how you’re made._ “Can I see your driver’s license?”

His eyebrows quirked; he wasn’t expecting that one. He took his wallet from his back pocket, flipped it open, and offered his license. _Sebastião Fernández Carriedo._ What had seemed like a good plan five seconds ago ( _ah, excellent good sir, now if you would be so kind as to drive me to a bar and/or shady street corner_ ) now soured in my mouth. I passed it back to him. My hands were shaking. We could both see that my hands were shaking.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. Through the insanity, I liked his flavor of concern; not smothering like a mum, not take-charge like a father. Just the distanced empathy of a fellow fuck-up. Although he looked a lot more put-together than most of the fuck-ups in my life.

I imagined myself going back to the party, sitting in the same room as Marianne and Antonio, talking civilly with all of them. Watching Antonio put his arm around her. Having her ask me how I was. Answering her. Saying something other than _You almost killed me how could you do this to me I hate you so much._

If I went back to the party, I would last ten or fifteen or twenty minutes, and then I wouldn’t be able to take it again and I would end up getting a cab to a bar and having Just One Drink, and that would turn into a whole night, and I would be right back to where I was a year ago. Or, more likely, I would set off on my way to do that and Gilbert or Mikkel would push me into their car and take me home, and probably they’d stay with me until I went to bed so they’d be sure I wasn’t going to do anything you couldn’t show on the news.

I didn’t want to ruin anyone else’s night.

But if I went home by myself, with this feeling inside me, I didn’t know what might happen.

And that scared the living hell out of me.

“Arthur.”

I snapped out of my panicked thoughts. Sebastião held up his car keys. He had a shiny black ring on his finger and a tribal sun tattooed on the back of his hand. His eyes, a far warmer green than mine, offered me an escape from the horror of myself. He said, “Let’s go get some coffee.”

I stared, uncomprehending at first. This was real, this was happening. What did adults say in this situation? I went with the first vaguely responsible thing that came to mind. “Are you sure?”

He arched an eyebrow.

So we went to get some coffee.


	3. Chapter 3

Sebastião didn’t talk on the way to the coffee, which I was grateful for. He didn’t ask me why I’d been murdering an aged couch. He didn’t tell me not to smudge his window with the side of my face. He didn’t even turn up the volume on the CD he’d been listening to. He just drove his unremarkable sedan and let me rest my head against the blessedly cool window, watching the CD player silently cycle through Track 4, Track 5, Track 6. I wondered if he was a hipster like Lars. CDs weren’t as bad as cassettes. Not that any of that shite mattered right now, when I was one bad thought away from breaking down in the passenger seat of an acquaintance’s car.

I wasn’t going to break down. I was fine. Except for the feeling in my chest like I was a house of cards. Like each breath was just shy of shaking. Like I was fragile, and had to be careful of breaking myself.

I didn’t like the feeling, but if I got angry, that might fracture something. Here was where weed would have helped, but I was clean. Clean, clean, clean. Shiny and new. Like a scar. Or a first-degree burn.

I expected Sebastião to take us to some chain, a 7-Eleven or something, for the touted coffee. But no, we pulled into the empty parking lot of a little café (the sort of place your mother-in-law would call _quaint_ on Facebook) that was most definitely not open at 9:51 PM. The front windows were dark, but I could sort of see a light source in the back, if I screwed with my eyes a bit. Through glass, through more glass, through nighttime. Now was the time for warped perception. Now was the time to be with someone you trusted, so you knew what they were. I looked at the man in the driver’s seat. The brother of a man who did not like me had just taken me to the dark, stranded parking lot of an establishment that probably couldn’t afford security cameras.

“If you’re going to rape me, kill me first,” I said. “Please and thanks.”

Sebastião quirked an eyebrow at me. “Well. There went the mood.”

“Oh, was there a mood? I’m in a mental breakdown sort of mood, so it meshed well for me.”

Now he quirked the other eyebrow. “I was joking.”

“I wasn’t.” I was beginning to think this might have been a mistake. “Listen, I can just call a cab and you can go back to the party—”

“I’d rather be here with you,” Sebastião said, abruptly emphatic, “than back there with my brother.”

Wow. His bad blood must’ve been really bad if he’d rather spend time with a fucked-up British rockstar than with a friendly, happy, easy-on-the-eyes Spanish popstar. But there was still the matter of our venue. “Well, thanks, but were you planning on robbing this place? It doesn’t seem to be offering caffeinated services at present.”

Sebastião knocked his knuckles on the dash, eyes bright and squeezed just a little like at the beginning of a laugh. “Don’t worry. They’ll give us coffee.”

Coffee was the least of my worries in life right now, so I didn’t worry. I just got out of the car and followed Sebastião round to the back door. He knocked out a brief rhythm, one of those that everyone has heard before but nobody knows the name of. A muffled voice called, “Coming!” and a few moments later the door opened to reveal a cheerful mocha-skinned girl with flour smudged on her cheek.

“Hi, Bas,” she said. _(Oh, great, another French girl.)_ “I thought you were going to a party tonight? For some rock guy?”

Here it came. My heart normally would’ve swelled at the idea of showing someone my famous face, giving autographs or posing for a photo. But right now, with my rib cage feeling like a tent about to blow over in the wind, I wasn’t in the meet-and-greet mood. At all.

“I was going to,” Sebastião said, smiling easily. “But my friend here had a bit of a rough night. He could use some of your soothing brew.”

I looked up at him, surprised. Countless people would’ve been thrilled to introduce me, just for the ego boost: _Behold how I stand next to someone who has been on magazine covers. Therefor, I am important._ But he hadn’t taken advantage. I really needed to figure out what it was about myself that attracted good people. _Well, good people are the ones who clean up messes._ He was the first-responder, and I was the raging chemical fire. (More like tenth-responder, at this point, but there was no need to cling to irrelevant details like that.)

She gave me a sympathetic smile. “Oh, that’s too bad. I’ll get a pot going, that’ll make you feel better. We use . . .”

Her spiel about the natural flavors and the bedtimes stories they read to their coffee beans was pretty much entirely lost on me as I realized she’d been in the process of baking, hence the flour all over her shirt. The back door opened up into the kitchen, and a long counter was covered in the makings of croissants, danishes, donuts, bagels, and, “Scones?”

She blinked. “Huh?”

I walked past her, over to the counter. The lot of them were sat on a cooling rack, and through the chocolate-and-coffee-and-yeast scent of the kitchen I could smell the scones. I touched one, just a little too hot. I broke it in half anyway, listening to the barely audible tear of pastry and feeling the gasp of steam trail up to my face.

“I wish I could take a picture of what you just looked like,” Michelle said. I glanced at her, and the delighted smile on her face was sweeter than the air in here. “I love watching people enjoy my food. And you haven’t even tasted it yet!”

Now I was torn, because I didn’t want to eat it and be more reminded of England—I hadn’t been back since I moved out except for tours, and I’d stayed as far away from the old terrace as possible—but I also didn’t want to get rid of it now that she was emotionally invested in my enjoyment of her baking. So I said, “Have you any butter, milady?”

Her cheeks actually darkened a little, and a tiny voice in the back of my head started saying things like _Haven’t had a cute one in a while_ and _She must be over eighteen if she’s working this late_ and _Are there still condoms in the bedroom?_ I silenced that tiny voice as swiftly as possible. It had not only caused trouble in my life; it was especially dangerous because it caused trouble in other people’s lives, too.

“Sure, there’s butter,” she said, and offered me a pat of it—that was the unit of measure for butter, wasn’t it? I had no idea how the fuck I knew that, probably Marianne or Bjorn was to blame—on a knife that would be useless for stabbing a couch with. I buttered my scone and took a bite of it just like that, a big bite that would have utterly screwed the correct scone-to-tea ratio that was intended by God. I was a bit tempted to gag, because it wasn’t exactly stimulating to the palate, but imagining what this sacrilege would have done to my parents made it worth it. I pictured my mother brought to tears and my father fitting on the parlor floor.

I remembered playing my music—not _my_ music, but the music I’d bought with my pittance of pocket change—so loud that the teacups rattled in the cabinets downstairs. I remembered my father’s words, exactly: _You’re lucky I’m kind enough to only beat you, rather than put you out on the street. Do you think the partners would let their sons get away with all this? They would be disinherited. Dear God, I’ll be glad when this bloody phase ends._

“Arthur.” Sebastião said my name in a way that quite clearly implied he’d said it at least twice before this instance.

I set the scone down. “Thanks, love, these are great. But I’m not really hungry. But thanks.”

I figured if I thanked her a lot, at least one of them would sound genuine.

She smiled hesitantly. “Oh, that’s okay. Why don’t you guys go grab a table, I’ll bring the coffee.” She perked up a little. “Actually, if you’re staying awhile? Why don’t you bring your guitar in, Bas?”

Sebastião glanced at me for verification, but I couldn’t tell if he wanted my approval for the table or the guitar. So I just saluted him with two fingers and headed to the shadowy front of the café, which was lit by only the light coming from the doorway of the kitchen.

“Oh, sorry, the light switch is over there,” Michelle told me.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I like it like this.”

“Oh, um, okay.”

A minute later, Sebastião found me curled up in a booth, knees bent, feet on the seat, arms crossed over my chest like a dead man’s. He glanced at me but didn’t comment, just sat down opposite me and started tuning his guitar. Facing the kitchen, his face was lit with weak yellow light. One side of him was out of the booth, so he could hold his guitar. The hand tattooed with the sun was in the light; his other, which I now realized was inked with a matching tribal moon, was in the shadow. I thought about pointing this out, but then decided to keep it to myself. It was soothing, my secret coincidence. Like putting a special pebble under your pillow. I’d had a special pebble once. It was grey, with one white spot on it, and heavenly smooth. Where was that pebble now?

_I wonder if people would listen to a song about a pebble._

Michelle brought us our coffee and a small dish of milks, creams, and sugars. “There you go.” She winked at Sebastião. “Play me something happy.”

She left. I watched Sebastião pour two tiny milks into his coffee, then use a thin brown stick to stir it in. His fingers weren’t as long and thin as Mikkel’s—the Danish bastard was born to play bass—but they were just as deft as mine, and had matching calluses on the tips. I wondered if he’d ever bled. I couldn’t really imagine an acoustic guitarist getting so intense he hurt himself, but then, Sebastião didn’t look very much like an acoustic guitarist. My gaze drifted upward, over his chest—a few curly dark hairs peeked from the V of his shirt—up to his face.

He was watching me watch him. He asked, “Any professional advice?”

I slowly poured a milk into my coffee. “Not for acoustic.”

Sebastião gave a slow, knowing nod. “I see.” He looked down at his guitar, amused, and picked out the opening chord of _Pretty Boy_ , which had been featured all over the gaff when it was first released and had landed me a spot on a list of 50 LGBTQ Influencers (a low spot, which was fair since all I’d really done was play at a few rallies, donate a portion of proceeds to PFLAG, and show the world that some rockstars liked to suck dick sometimes). I still saw people posting the lyrics next to aesthetic selfies of themselves, and it usually got a spike in sales during Pride month. It hadn’t exactly helped decrease the endless fanart of Gilbert and/or Mikkel fucking my brains out, but at this point they might as well drop that shite on our enemies because it would apparently never die.

“No. Play something I don’t know,” I said, sprinkling less sugar than I wanted into my coffee.

Without protest, Sebastião played a song I’d never heard before. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but his finger work was as good as I’d thought it would be, and there was little more satisfying than listening to someone play a guitar _well_. The song slipped down my throat along with the coffee and the shadows, and when Sebastião started to sing, his voice came too—all of it was dark and husky and sexy, and it warmed me from the inside out and solidified the uncertain things inside me. I was being built back up; not muffled, but insulated. Supported. I had no idea what Sebastião was singing, but it was in Spanish, so it could’ve been about cleaning out a litter box and it still would’ve had legs opening.

Sebastião strummed the last fittingly (expectedly) poignant note of his song, then sipped his coffee. He smiled faintly at Michelle’s clapping from the kitchen, but his eyes didn’t leave me.

“Nine out of ten,” I said. “Points off for being acoustic.”

His eyes glittered, corners going squinty again. “For not being loud and angry?”

“Precisely.” Something about the way he’d been looking at me seemed a bit too canny to me, so I asked, “Do you know me? Have we met?”

He took another sip of coffee, then set his cup down. “I didn’t think you’d remember.”

I winced a bit. “Drunk?”

“Oh, very. What do you call it? Plastered?”

“Snockered is a personal favorite.”

He broke into a grin so abruptly handsome it knocked the breath from my lungs. _Holy shit._ “Well, you were snockered. It must have been . . . two years ago? Maybe three. We hadn’t moved here permanently yet. Me and my brother, I mean. We went to a party, I think it was in L.A.?”

Well, that explained it. The West Coast had not been good for me. At least the East Coast was vaguely familiar—a belligerent sea of old-moneyed people striding through the fierce current of the underpaid majority. The West Coast? Everybody was either famous or stoned and it was too hot to do anything but sit around and get high. Plus all three of us had gotten sunburnt the second we stepped off the plane. Basically if I went back before I died, it would be too soon.

“You and the band were there,” Sebastião continued. “And Marianne.”

Just a slight twist of his lip at the name, but I would’ve noticed something ten times subtler when it was about that foul wench. “You hate her, too?”

He didn’t laugh, but he came close. “Hate is a strong word. She’s with my brother, and I’m not speaking with him. Let’s just say I don’t think she has very good taste.”

I stared at him pointedly until he remembered that Marianne had dated me for almost three years.

“Sorry,” he said, in a very complicated way. Like he genuinely meant it, but at the same time he knew I wasn’t really good taste material. (I couldn’t disagree with that, after all that had happened.) “No offense.”

“None taken. For the most part.” I sipped some coffee. It was getting cold, but that was alright because I’d lost interest in anything to do with food. I just needed something to do with my mouth. “Got to have thick skin in the entertainment business.”

Sebastião stood up, guitar in one hand, the other offered to me. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

I put my feet on the floor and scooted to the end of the booth, but didn’t stand yet. “Did you want something out of all this? Or did you actually take me to this place to make me feel better?”

A tiny furrow appeared between his eyebrows. “Did I make you feel better?”

Back in the day, this would have felt like a surrender, but now just felt . . . nice. “Yes, you did.”

“Well, good. That’s what I wanted out of all this.”

I took his hand, let him pull me to my feet. “So you’re one of those kind people I hear about on television.”

At last, he laughed, and I could hear it rasping in his throat, like he had a rain cloud in his chest. “You’re welcome.”

I smiled, because he was still holding my hand, and also because he looked fucking edible after he laughed. “Cheers, mate.”

 

* * *

 

After we thanked Michelle and got back on the road, it finally occurred to me to check my phone. It was buzzing with a text even as I picked it up; the screen was filled with missed calls from Gilbert and Mikkel, and 27 increasingly outraged texts from Gil. I tapped his number and held the phone to my ear.

He answered on the first ring. “What the actual _fuck_ , Arthur?”

Arthur, not Art or Kirkland. Wow. He was actually angry. “Sorry, I was getting coffee.”

A long pause. I could hear him breathing, deep breaths through the speaker. “You were getting coffee.”

“Yeah. With Sebastião.”

“With Sebastião.”

“Is there an echo on this thing?”

“No, stop. No joking. We didn’t know where you were, you tore my fucking couch open with a screwdriver—”

“Okay, I’m sorry about the couch. I’ll pay you a quid, that’s about what it’s worth.”

“What did I _just_ fucking say about joking.”

I went silent, because he did actually sound close to fury, and I guess, well, whatever, it didn’t make me feel the greatest to hear him pissed-off at me.

Another pause from him, more deep breaths. When he spoke again, it was softer. “I’m not mad you didn’t tell me where you were going. I get that I don’t need to keep tabs on you. Unlike Bjorn and Mick, I trust you not to fuck yourself over. But goddamn it, Art. The party was _for you_. It’s kind of a dick move to just leave.”

 _Unlike Bjorn and Mick._ Ouch. I must have been feeling better, though, because I felt myself bristle. “Well, it’s a dick move to throw me a party and then invite Marianne and Antonio.”

In the driver’s seat, Sebastião made a soft sound of assent. I’d never been so validated by a barely audible grunt, but apparently that’s where I was in my life.

Now Gilbert just sounded tired. “Do you need a ride home?”

“No. Bas is taking me home. I’ll see you tomorrow, ready to make magic.”

“Asshole.” But there was fondness in there, by God.

“Night-night.” I hung up, then realized what I’d said and slowly looked over at Sebastião. “Uh. I guess you’re taking me home.”

He glanced at me, gorgeous lips curled up in the corners. “Guess so.”

 

* * *

 

The gate was open at my house. There’d been a time when that gate would never, ever be kept open, because God-knew-who might turn up on my doorstep wanting to stick something into me or vice versa. But now that I was old news, nobody was screaming topless on my lawn.

It also helped that it was 11:02 PM. Topless screaming generally happened during business hours.

Sebastião parked in front of the steps and got out of the car. I got out, too, and followed his gaze. My house wasn’t _that_ impressive, but then, I’d grown up around a different kind of classiness. My parents’ home was just a terrace, but it was a fucking _nice_ terrace. Money had assured everything be placed just so, everywhere. _A place for everything and everything in its place._ It had chafed, back when I was stuck there. I’d paced every stretch of floor in the terrace. A good thing about America: there was space. I could have a property that sprawled. This was my extravagance. Breathing room, without neighbors commenting over the fence about the state of my fucking lobelias.

I guess I’d always been restless, now that I thought about it. Maybe . . . Maybe I hadn’t changed. Maybe it was just the coping mechanisms that had.

_Well. That’s not depressing at all._

“Arthur, I’m beginning to think you need to go to bed.”

I blinked. “What makes you say that?”

Sebastião regarded me with the exasperated fondness I’d only come to expect from Gilbert or Mikkel. It looked decidedly good in green eyes. “This is the third time tonight I’ve had to get you out of your head.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Just a symptom of being a rockstar.” I made a mental note to try and make lyrics out of that, even though the accurate version was _a symptom of being an addict._ Eh, too close to home. “Were you saying something?”

“I was trying to ask you about your car.”

“Wrecked. DUI.” I shrugged. “Rehab. Happily ever after.”

Sebastião bent a knee to put one of his ridiculous monk shoes on one of the steps leading up to the front door, as if I needed more reason to look toward his groin. “That usually comes after the story’s over.”

I shook my head. “Nah, that’s no good. My story’ll be over when I’m dead, or in a nursing home. I want to enjoy my happily ever after while I still have all my faculties.”

Christ, he had the perfect eyebrows for arching. “It seems like you enjoy losing a faculty or two.”

“Well.” I kicked a tiny stone into the grass. “Everything in moderation.”

“You don’t seem like someone very good at moderation.”

I jerked my chin up. “How about you stop saying what I _seem_ like?”

His head tilted to one side. “Then I’ll have to find out what you really are.”

“Well, then why don’t you do that?” I stepped closer to him, realized I was three inches shorter, and jumped up onto the front steps so I could look down at him. “Come here tomorrow. For lunch. At noon.”

His eyes were glittering again as he looked up at me. “We’ll see if I have room in my busy schedule.”

I kicked his foot. The ridiculous monk was unimpressed with my DM. “Go fuck yourself.”

He blessed the world with another glorious raspy laugh. “I’ll keep you in mind.” He joined me on the middle step, close enough that _oh fuck_. “For inspiration.”

I swallowed, tipping my head back. “Or you could stay here and we could get out of bed at noon.”

Sebastião took my hand, the non-gloved one, and pressed a kiss to the back of it. His eyes, sparkling and squinty, smiled at me even when his lips smirked. “Everything in moderation, amado.”

I considered the fact that my heart had just restart itself, and my hand tingled where his lips and stubble had touched it, and I didn’t speak Spanish so he could’ve just called me an asshat for all I knew. I also considered that he had rescued me from myself this evening, and though I was still antsy, I was no longer a danger to myself or bystanders. He had made me feel better, because he wanted to make me feel better.

I pushed him off my steps.

He stumbled, but it wasn’t enough to knock him down; he just hopped down gracefully, chuckling to himself.

 _Don’t leave._ I forced myself to stay where I was, and called to him, “Thanks again.” _He’s about to leave, say more than that!_ “For. You know. This. It was good.” _Speak intelligently, continue the conversation!_ “The coffee.” _Jesus F. Christ._ “And the rest of it.”

He didn’t look back at me, just called, sing-song, “Goodnight, Arthur,” and got into his car. I watched him drive down the lane, pause at the gate, then vanish from sight.

The red of the taillights had just faded into blackness when my phone buzzed. A text from Gilbert.

**_Home in one piece?_ **

I texted him back.

**_More or less._ **


	4. Chapter 4

Showers were only a morning thing at the rehab centre, so I enjoyed my first before-bed shower in essentially a year. For a house I spent very little time in between tours, the bathroom was needlessly fancy. No bottles here, just a dispenser on the wall with different sections for shampoo, conditioner, body wash. Not for the first time, I thought there should have been another section for shaving cream. It was lovely, though, to be able to just have a razor in my hand without needing a psychiatrist to give me clearance for it first. Shaving was a privilege when wrist-slitting was at times a very viable alternative to withdrawal. I shaved a place the unlucky majority would never get to see, then remembered Sebastião’s chest hair and wondered if I should even have bothered. _Whatever._ I had _Pretty Boy_ in my head, after hearing the opening, so it went together well.

_Hit or miss darling do you swing that way_

_Yes and no surprise! I’m only half gay_

Ah, my towels were so much softer than the ones at the centre. I stepped into a pair of boxers, which I only wore to bed because they were a crime against humanity in general, but even worse under skinny jeans. I looked at myself in the mirror, something I’d generally avoided since the crash because heroin withdrawal wasn’t exactly flattering. I’d sort of become resigned to the fact of my face. When it was on magazines at the grocery check-out, it was hard not to. I didn’t _like_ it, but I didn’t really hate it anymore, either. It was just part of the machine. It could’ve been better, but it wasn’t, so fuck it.

_Wink at the girls, blow a kiss for the men_

_Don’t touch the fag, dear, you_ _don’t know where I’ve been_

_Go on, handsome, just ask me the question_

_Such a ho! Frilly bow! Who’s a pretty boy, then?_

I hadn’t intended it to be a happy song when I started to write it. And really, it wasn’t. People interpreted it as a statement of pride, which was alright, but it hadn’t come from a place of happiness or self-confidence. It hadn’t been written to be a publicity stunt, either, though that’s what some journalists called it. It was just that dating a girl had, for some reason, convinced people that I wasn’t queer. And after growing up with a never-ending stream of _oi poofter watch it daffy fucking faggot_. . . Well. I wouldn’t want people to be misinformed.

I imagined Sebastião listening to me squeal _pretty boy! pretty boy!_ through his speakers. Had he seen the music video? Did he think the prancing and giggling was over-the-top? Or maybe the bright pink suits Mikkel and Gilbert had worn? Actually—the lolly deep-throating was the most likely candidate. Even I kind of regretted that, if only because of all the fucking GIFs people made from it.

I already had a sense that it would be pointless, but I got into bed. I lay in the darkness. I thought about Sebastião’s chest hair. And his jeans. And his belt. And his hands. And his voice, husky and thick and sexy and ready to sing my song. _Pretty boy, pretty boy._

Ten minutes later, I cleaned up the mess and lay in darkness once again. I breathed in. I breathed out. I googled _amado_. Mexican drug lord? I googled _amado in english._ Loved? _Be_ loved?

Goddamn it.

I rolled over onto my stomach, thumbing through the contacts on my phone. I still had Marianne (CUNT) and Antonio (CUNTO) saved, just in case they called me, which they had never done. I kept seeing them standing there, beside each other, perfectly comfortable with zero space between each other. Were Marianne and I that comfortable, ever? I could barely remember any quiet times with her. Just screaming matches. And sex. And leaving to go on tour, only to come back, exhausted, to this: _I just don’t know how much longer we can do this. Every time you go, you come back worse._ And that wasn’t even the last time I came home.

I wondered if Mikkel and Bjorn ever got into fights about touring. We’d had more tours since they got together than since Marianne and I did; in other words, they got through it, and I hadn’t managed it. Bastards. My biggest comfort when Mikkel got with somebody before I did—besides the comfort that Gilbert seemed to be permanently single—was that it was really early into our career, so it had no chance of lasting. And then it bloody well did last, damn them both. _At least Gil is still single._ In an interview after _Pretty Boy_ ’s release, we’d all been asked about our orientations, and instead of being gay with Mick or bi with me, he said he was _demisexual._ We’d all looked at him, and he’d sort of blushed and explained it meant he was only physically attracted to people once he’d gotten into an emotional relationship with them first. The interviewer hadn’t known what to say to that, so I’d saved him: _Notice he said people and not men, so Mick is in the minority. You heard it here first, folks, FBB is one-third gay and two-thirds slut._

Not really, though. I was the only slut, as it turned out.

Thinking about Gilbert made me remember the disapproval and disappointment in his voice earlier, and that just made me think of my parents. Up early for church, starched linens. Arthur Kirkland in the choir, drowning out the other tenors. Mum’s wedding ring cutting into my little hand as one of Daddy’s future partners looked down his big nose at me. _Quite the pipes on the little lad, eh?_ But he said it like it was a bad thing.

My parents kept shaking their heads at me. My car kept flipping, over and over and over. Crashing would have been a kindness. My mind would have stopped racing along with it. An end, even if it was terrible, was infinitely better than being left hanging. My phone had locked itself, sending me back into the dark. This room was nothing, and I couldn’t take it. I’d never been able to handle being alone with myself.

I texted Gilbert.

**What are you wearing**

No response. I texted Mikkel.

**Amado Carrillo Fuentes died in 1997**

Shocking: no response from him, either. I looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. 11:49. I considered texting Liz. Bad idea, probably. I considered texting Rod. Bad idea, definitely. I considered how much easier it is to sleep after a beer or a joint. Bad idea. Period. I looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. 11:50.

This night would never—

Wait.

There was someone I could talk to.

I got dressed. Sad thing about summer in the US: a lot of the time it was too hot for leather jackets. But it cooled off at night, and it couldn’t be less night right now, so I threw a jacket on over a fashionably torn tank top and headed outside, across the empty yard to the annex behind the house. It would’ve been polite to do this when I first got home, but . . . well, out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

I knocked on the door, then knocked harder just in case he was a deep sleeper.

A few moments passed. Then the door opened, and there was Alfred, wearing sweatpants that were barely bothering to cling to his hips. No shirt, so there were the abs, for the love of everything. At least those ones had an excuse for existing—Alfred did all the yard work and fixed things that broke except when the things were me—but they still taunted me.

“Oh,” Alfred said, then cleared the sleep out of his throat. He rubbed it out of his eyes, too, then asked, “Uh, welcome back. Is something wrong?”

“No,” I said. “Thanks, also.”

“Uh, you’re welcome.”

He looked down at me.

I looked up at him.

“Want to go to McDonald’s?” I asked.

Alfred stared at me for a full minute, or at least it felt like a full minute. Then he pinched his arm, and when that didn’t do it for him, he said, “Hang on a sec.” He retreated into his shadowy lair, then returned with mobile in hand. “It’s, like, midnight.”

I shrugged. “They’re open.”

Alfred blinked in slow motion. “Uh . . . Yeah, I guess. Okay.”

“Great, put a shirt on and get your keys. You’re driving.”

 

* * *

 

And that’s how we ended up sitting in a lifeless McDonald’s under apocalyptic fluorescent lights, eating salt with chips somewhere underneath. There was music on the radio. It was the kind of useless pop music that wasn’t fast enough to dance to or filthy enough to fuck to. Alfred kept sipping his Coke and staring at me like I was a mythical creature.

“So,” he said, lips finally leaving his straw. “How was, uh, rehab?”

“Eh,” I said. “I’ve stayed in worse places.”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

He didn’t know me. I wondered if he wanted to.

Alfred looked down at his phone, but he didn’t tap anything. His background was a picture of himself smiling along with someone who looked like him, but softer. I leaned closer to see, and he spun his phone around for me. “That’s my brother. Matthew.”

“Oh.” I glanced up at Alfred. “I haven’t met him, have I?”

His brow furrowed a little. “No.”

“Right. Just checking.” Matthew was the cuter version of Alfred, which was saying something since Alfred already had the cute jock thing going on. They were both puppies, but Matthew was fluffier. My gaze kept coming back to his eyes. He was smiling, but there was still something unhappy in his eyes. Something sad, or something lonely.

“His anxiety is pretty bad,” Alfred said quietly. “Gil has been a big help.”

“What?” I must have heard him wrong, the noise of concerts had finally deafened me. “Gil?”

Alfred stared at me for a second like a deer caught in headlights, two fries stuck out his mouth. The great American walrus. “He and Mattie have been dating for, like, months. Five or six months. He didn’t tell you?”

He was afraid he was in trouble, though with me or with Gilbert I couldn’t be sure. He’d just let a rockstar’s secret slip, perhaps the fear wasn’t misplaced. I didn’t feel the pain of it, because I was in shock. Gil had never lied to me, never kept a secret from me. _Or maybe he did, and I just never knew._ It was a blade so sharp I couldn’t feel the stab until it was twisted. _Why wouldn’t he tell me? He said he trusted me._

I grabbed for earlier comforts. Bas’s voice, fingers on strings. Sipping coffee in the shadows. The promise of lunch and creation tomorrow. _Tomorrow is a fresh start. You just have to make it there._

Slowly, I ate a chip. A French fry. I was eating a French fry in McDonald’s. I was fine.

I chewed. I swallowed. I said, “Fuck.”

Alfred looked at me inquiringly, still concerned.

“Everybody is dating,” I said. I wanted to hurl myself back against the seat dramatically, but the booth was designed for good posture so I settled for an impotent slump. “Christ.”

Alfred nodded. “Yeah, I feel ya. Everybody except us, I guess.”

I looked at him. I knew what this look was. It was my lowered-chin dark-eyes look. It was what I did for photo shoots when they said _Okay, Art, give me brooding. Give me dark but sexy._ I’d previously thought it impossible for someone with a snub nose and freckles to give anyone _dark but sexy_ , but if I’d learned anything from a decade in the entertainment business, it was this: lighting is everything.

Fluorescents at midnight probably turned me into a ghoul, but Alfred’s ears still turned red. “Oh. That wasn’t, like. I mean. I like girls. J-Just girls. Sorry.”

I gave him a second more of the look, then rested my head back against the back of the seat. “I know that.” I crunched a chip in half. “You’ve worked for me for two years.”

Alfred smiled hesitantly. “Yeah . . . two and a half, but, yeah . . .”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

He cleared his throat, drawing a smiley face with his ketchup. “You were on tour for most of it. So we’ve never had an actual, like, genuine conversation.”

I waved a chip at him like a conductor. “Alright. So let’s have an actual genuine conversation. Tell me about your brother.”

A smile, slow at first and then all-at-once, bloomed across his face. “Okay. Well, he’s my little brother. He’s really nice, everybody thinks he’s nicer than me, but he’s quieter too. And he’s, uh, gay, obviously. Our parents didn’t really like that at first, so I kinda had to referee for them. But I was on Mattie’s side, all the way. You can’t just discriminate against people for something they don’t have any control over—”

I waved the chip again, in a circle like _yes, back to the topic at hand, please._

Alfred’s smile widened, but in a sheepish way, poking an uncertain dimple on one side. “Sorry. Uh, what else . . . well, he has anxiety, like I said. I think it’s mostly because he has really bad self-esteem. Maybe that’s because of our parents, I’m not sure. Our dad kinda always liked me better, I guess he was a momma’s boy. He just liked to stay inside and read. He hardly ever wanted to play sports or do fun stuff.” He paused here to stuff his remaining chips into his mouth, and mercifully swallowed them before continuing to speak. “But yeah, Gil has been a big help. I think a lot of the help is just that they’re dating, so Mattie knows somebody wants him, y’know? So, like, he knows he’s worth wanting.”

I looked down at our food. I had half of my chips left because I wasn’t here to eat, and all Alfred had left was a smiley face next to a pool of blood. The lights made all of it look like a crime scene, and the insufferable pop music was the most heinous crime of all.

“So,” Alfred said. I lifted my head. Bravely, he asked, “So if this wasn’t to get me in bed, what was it for?”

I thought about making a joke that _you’re onto me_ except he was actually onto me and I didn’t have any sort of excuse prepared. I hunched over the table and looked over at the advertisements for food that people would buy regardless of how big it was on a poster and said, “Well, I don’t know. Just—I was awake, you were awake—”

“I wasn’t awake,” Alfred interrupted.

The hackles were lifting. “ _Well_ , I just wanted to do something for you. You do all the work round the place, so—”

Warmth on my wrist. Alfred’s hand was light on my non-gloved one, squeezing gently. His eyes met mine, finally calm, a kind smile tugging at his lips. “It’s okay. Everybody gets lonely sometimes.”

My heart didn’t so much as shiver as let out a content, shuddery sigh that one gives when lowering into a bath. Just like that, I wanted nothing more than to bottle up that feeling and turn it into words, chords, so everyone could hear it and feel it, too. I grabbed a napkin and took a pen out of my jacket (quick tip for being famous: always have a pen) and scribbled _share a smile slip it under the door leave it behind take my hand brothers in arms._ Above it, I wrote: _Cozy Comfy McDonald’s Song._ One of my better working titles.

“Is that a song?”

I capped the pen, folded the napkin, and put them both into my jacket. “It might be.” I pushed my fries toward him. “You could actually come in the house and listen to us play.”

Alfred’s delight at the offer of chips had him already grinning, but my words had his head tipping back for a laugh so loud the nocturnal animals behind the counter looked over at us reproachfully. I nobly resisted the urge to flip them off, waiting to hear what Alfred found so funny.

“Ah, don’t worry about that,” he said, barely keeping his amusement behind his lips. “When you play, I can hear you from the gate.”

Oh. Oops.

“But hey, you guys sounded good today. Or, yesterday.”

I took his hand off the table, formed it into a fist, and knocked it with my own. “Cheers, mate.”

 

* * *

 

Déjà vu. I was once again standing on my front steps with someone more attractive than me. I put my hands into the pockets of my jacket, walking backward into my foyer. The only light was the red neon of the giant guitar. Alfred was too golden to look devilish in it the scarlet glow; I made a mental note to find out someday how sexy Sebastião looked in it.

“Want a tour?” I asked. “I don’t remember ever showing you where we record.”

Alfred’s smile had just a little bit of exasperation in it. “It’s past midnight.”

I realized, just then, that I did have the dull throb of looming exhaustion in my brain. Thoughts of French girls and secretive brothers were muffled by my mind’s quiet but persistent request for _rest, please, rest._ Rehab had, evidently, made midnight a late bedtime for me. _That’s a good thing,_ I thought, trying to be sensible and mature even though it was a bitter drink. A good time was out there, lost forever to sleep.

“Well. I guess that’s it, then.” I nodded to Alfred. “Thanks.”

“I should be thanking you, for the food. You gave me your fries, I owe you a life debt.”

I actually laughed at that. _A jock with brains, who knew._ “There’ll be more here tomorrow. Come in for lunch.”

“More McDonald’s?”

I recalled Rehab Lady’s voice, on leftovers day: “A cornucopia of culinary delights.”

Alfred gave me an easy smile, but his eyes were pretty tired. “Okie doke. I’ll drop in.” He stood in the doorway, hand on the knob. “Goodnight, Mr. Kirkland.”

I stepped up onto the bottom step of the staircase, the one that would take me up to an empty bed. “Good night, Mr. Jones.”

He closed the door behind him. I went to my bedroom, took off my clothes again, slithered under the covers. Finally, this didn’t feel like a battle. I closed my eyes and fell asleep to the taste of midnight MacDonald’s salt and an astonishingly optimistic thought: 

_Tomorrow might not be completely terrible._


	5. Chapter 5

I woke up with my mouth tasting like a bad version of the night before—Christ, if that wasn’t bloody familiar—and my legs lynched over the edge of the bed by severely tangled blankets. The good news: my dreams hadn’t resulted in anything that would warrant washed sheets. The bad news: I was pretty sure this house had absolutely no food in it.

Also, breaking news, because it made me want to break something: Gilbert and I needed to have a _little talk_ ASAP.

I had to look impressive for it, so I put some eyeliner on and hooked a chain through two belt loops. I considered wearing boots with serious heels—the better to intimidate with—but decided against it because if they noticed I was wearing them it would just defeat the purpose. And I didn’t own any boots that were designed to _not_ be noticed. So the trusty DMs would have to do.

The kitchen was ludicrously large, and I had cooked in it exactly zero times. I’d had caterers in several times—they’d be showing up in a few hours, actually—but I’d never actually bought groceries and put them away. _Is that depressing?_ I opened and shut endless empty cabinets. _This isn’t how adults live._

I was twenty-six. I had gone from a nobody to famous and back to pretty much a nobody again, or at least that’s what it seemed like. What were you supposed to do when your career peaked before your bones were done growing?

I didn’t know what you were supposed to do, but I had an unopened sleeve of graham crackers in the back of a cupboard, so what I did was eat those for breakfast by myself.

 

* * *

 

I was lounging on the front steps, watching Alfred mow the lawn (with a ride-on mower, keep your trousers on), when Gilbert’s car pulled in. I stood up slowly. My chain jangled. Time for justice.

Gilbert and Mikkel stopped at the bottom of the steps, looking up at me. They both studied my attire, and Mikkel guessed first: “Field trip?”

“No.” I narrowed my eyes at Gilbert.

His pale eyebrows spiked toward his hair. “What? Is this about last night? I thought we’d be over that.”

“We are over that.” I stepped down a step, just one. I’d give him that, but nothing more. “But it is about something that happened last night. Something I _found out_ last night.”

Mikkel set down his bass case and crossed his arms over his chest, settling in for the show.

Gilbert looked confused. I wanted him to look uneasy, too, but he didn’t. “And what did you find out?”

His lack of fear of my imminent wrath took a lot of the fun out of this. It had been a lot more explosive in my head. “I found out you’re dating Matthew Jones. Have been, apparently, for six months.”

“Seven,” Gilbert corrected.

“That is not the appropriate response to this issue,” I told him, and elaborated with, “Why was this not the first thing out of your mouth when you picked me up? Do friends not tell their friends when they’re in love with someone? Is that not a momentous occasion in a, whatever you are, demigod’s life?”

“Hey. Don’t be a dick,” Mikkel felt the need to say.

I pointed at him. “You telling me not to be a dick is really funny but I’m not in the laughing mood at present, so please save it for later.”

Gilbert lifted his hands. “Alright, alright. Nobody lose any tempers.” He looked up at me. “I didn’t tell you because Matthew hasn’t wanted me to tell anyone. He was terrified about dating a celebrity; he didn’t even want to be with me, for the longest time, because he worried people would find him and ask him questions and take his picture.”

I had the words _oh, the horror_ on my tongue, but I didn’t say them, because anxiety was nothing to be smarmy about. Then Mikkel would have reason to call me a dick. Besides, even for people without anxiety, dealing with the side order of paparazzi that always came with a main dish of celebrity was enough to make most folk gag. I hadn’t blown up at hounding reporters before, but I’d come close.

“Nobody knows about it,” Gilbert continued. “Just Alfred, Mick—and you, now. I haven’t told anybody without permission from Matt.” He shrugged, and it was a helpless thing, and I saw in that one gesture and in the apologetic look on his face that he loved that nervous puppy and no matter how close he was to his brothers, he would hold Matthew’s fragile heart above all else.

I looked at him, then away, at the tidy rows of shaved grass left by the blades of the mower. I wasn’t first priority for Gilbert, or for Mikkel. _That is okay. That is okay, because you don’t need to be._ I remembered: the three of us, young, signing our first record deal, partying afterward, celebrating, pretending we knew what we were doing in a bar, getting tipsy. I remembered: the three of us, older, walking the streets in a city that loved us, getting lost in the dark, shouting lyrics at the stars. I remembered: always, always, Mikkel or Gilbert or both of my brothers would follow me, wherever I needed or wanted to go. _I’ll go with Arthur, God knows who might creep up on him. You stay, I’ll go. I’m coming. Lead the way, Art._

You wouldn’t think it would be possible for someone to leave you behind while neither of you were moving and you were looking him right in the face, but you would be wrong.

“Art, hey.” Gilbert started up the stairs, hands held out to me. “Don’t—”

And I realized I had tears in my eyes.

 _Fuck fuck fuck._ I spun around and hurried into the house, chain jingling merrily. This wasn’t part of the plan. I was supposed to come out of this victorious, not—not . . .

Gilbert touched my shoulder, and I whirled around, gloved hand a fist, swinging for his jaw.

Mikkel grabbed both of my wrists and held them behind my back. “Relax, before you hurt yourself.”

I jerked in his grasp, glaring at him over my shoulder. “So _help_ me, you will die tonight.”

Gilbert squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Maybe this is part of it, too.”

I went still. There was a serious, tired tone in his voice. It wasn’t the same tired tone he’d used on the phone last night. It wasn’t exasperated. It was just—not done. God, no. _(Please.)_ Not done. But close.

“Maybe this is part of why I didn’t tell you.” Gilbert gestured to me, smudged eyeliner detained by a Dane. “I was afraid you would react like this.”

My dignity collapsed into a pool of blood on the floorboards.

“You said you trusted me.”

It was a small voice that said that. Not FBB Frontman Arthur Kirkland’s voice. It was the voice of some skinny British kid who ran away from home.

Gilbert’s face twisted a little, pained. “I do trust you. But I didn’t want this to hurt you. It’s not . . .” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Mick and I aren’t doing this to hurt you. It just really, really fucking sucks that us living our lives does this to you. And I’m not saying it’s your fault,” he added quickly, before I _really_ went over the deep end. “It’s not. I’m sorry. I should have told you as soon as I could, instead of putting it off. That was a mistake. I apologize, Art.”

 _We’re okay. This means we’re okay._ But it didn’t really sound like we were, and it sure as hell didn’t feel like we were. But I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to introspect. I didn’t want to think about what this meant for the future, because—Jesus, _fuck_ the future. Fuck the change. An afternoon without thinking about our inevitable deaths, that’s what I wanted. So I didn’t let myself. I didn’t let myself do any of the mature, difficult things I was probably supposed to do. I just slumped back against Mikkel, and he hugged me from behind. His arms had always been a nice place to be. Gilbert’s, too. He came over and we all sort of embraced each other, messy and tight and safe. I closed my eyes, just for a second. _Game face fame face smile right for the limelight._

I pulled back, composed enough to say with an even voice, “It’s alright. We’re square.” I punched Gilbert’s shoulder and held up a hand before he could do the same to me. “I forgive you.”

Gilbert smiled, relieved. “Thank you.”

I couldn’t smile right now, so I just nodded and glanced between the pair of them. “Any more earth-shattering secrets about the last ten months to reveal? While the angst is still fresh?”

Mikkel and Gilbert glanced at each other, frowning thoughtfully, then shook their heads at me.

“Then let’s make some fucking magic.”

 

* * *

 

“I have something to cheer you up,” Mikkel said while we were tuning our instruments, which was not a euphemism in this instance. He played a riff that would clash sexily with the chords I’d written for the fuck song. It was fine, and then it was good, and then it was excellent. A good portion of its excellence was because Mikkel had eight godsends for fingers and his thumbs weren’t too shabby either. Basically, it was good, but it wasn’t going to keep anyone up at night.

“It won’t be a single,” Mikkel said, shaking his head a little. “I know, smartass.”

My lips curled in spite of themselves. It was nice to be known. I pointed at Mikkel’s bass and looked at Gilbert. “We’ll start with that.”

We were recording, but there wasn’t anyone in the booth to mix it, so it was really just for posterity. If we happened to make something profound, it would be somewhere in there to listen back. I’d learned long ago that it was a waste of Kiku’s time to call him in at the writing stage. The thing about art was that it was easy to duplicate the thing but often impossible to duplicate the feelings it gave people. The thing about my band, though, was that whatever we did the first time, we could do it better the second time. My curse: the more I performed, the better I sounded. Strung-out Arthur Kirkland was the very best sounding Arthur Kirkland. That’s how the fans liked me, even in the beginning—stumbling under the weight of the guitar, jumping about and cutting my hands open on the strings, screaming myself raw, messy and broken and dangerous.

They danced and pleaded and adored when I was only pretending to be those things. I couldn’t escape them, when I was pretending. But when the story came true, people weren’t adoring anymore.

_$90 tickets to watch art slur for an hour ffs_

_He was so drunk lmao what a waste_

_BRING BACK OLD FBB!!!!!!_

_Whatever I’d still have his babies tbh <3 _

Thanks, Internet.

 

* * *

 

For the next two hours, we worked. This was actual work. No silliness, no frilliness. Just writing out notes and lyrics and playing them or singing them and shooting down suggestions or adding them in and going over and over and over again. We focused mostly on the fuck song, but I had other ideas too, so we put a dent in those. It had been brutal, when we made the first album, to have Gilbert and Mikkel sit there and watch me sing my possible lyrics at them—and then, on top of that, have them say _That sounds kinda stupid. Clunky. Not intense enough._ It wasn’t as bad for the second album, partly because my skin had thickened and partly because I was writing my best lyrics at that point, or so the critics said. Number four was where things went downhill.

This was our fifth album. It wouldn’t be like number four. It would be great.

Somewhere after those two hours of work, when I barely knew there was a world outside of counting syllables and tapping out beats on the floor, there was a knock on the recording room door. It was a loud knock, to be heard over the noisy childbirth of my new fuck song.

I opened the door to Sebastião and Alfred. Seeing them there together, dark and light, was enough to take me aback for a moment. _To fuck and not to fuck._ Alfred had thrown a muscle shirt on, but it still showed all of his arms and most of his chest. None of that toned, golden skin could compete with the glimpse of bronze belly I got when Sebastião’s T-shirt—which said _(Judging You In Spanish)_ across the front—lifted along with his arm. His fingers gingerly adjusted an ear piercing, twisting the ring around. I knew that feeling; I still found myself fiddling with my helixes.

“Are they selling encyclopedias?” Gilbert called.

Alfred laughed, so suddenly at ease speaking to Gilbert that I wondered at it until I remembered that they probably knew each other well through Matthew. “Nah, man.”

Sebastião’s gaze lingered on me. “We’re here for something to eat.”

I looked at his lips long enough that he saw me doing it, then turned away, putting my guitar back on the rack. “Then let us feast.”

The caterer had covered every surface in the kitchen with burritos, quesadillas, nachos, a taco bar on the center island, and a big bowl of salad off to the side. I’d also had them supply us with some fruit punch, which was as close to a margarita as I could get without trouble arising. It was the most colorful my kitchen had ever been, and the caterer had lined it all up to be aesthetically pleasing; it was a spread you’d see in the type of magazine that Bjorn wrote for.

Mikkel regarded the room full of spice and turned to me. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“It’s not my fault all you eat is decapitated sandwiches.”

Alfred paused in his drooling delight to look over at us, concerned.

“Open sandwiches,” Mikkel translated, smiling for his benefit. “You only need one piece of bread. It’s easier to taste it that way.”

While Alfred had a quietly profound moment with this epiphany, I told Mikkel, “Eat a salad. Those are wholesome.”

Sebastião followed me over to the taco bar. He scooped some hamburger into the shell and said in an undertone, “You do know that Mexican food is different from Spanish food, right?”

 _Shite._ I didn’t look up from the delicate procedure of sprinkling just enough cheese. “Of course I do.” Oh well. None of my guests looked fussed about having this for lunch, aside from Mikkel frowning at the label of the ranch dressing. I could just hear Bjorn— _You really should avoid saturated fat. It’ll clog your arteries._ Sensi-fucking-ble. Meanwhile, I was Making Good Choices and fixing myself an inoffensive taco. I told Bas, “I used to eat these so hot I couldn’t feel my face afterward.”

Just a tiny twitch of the eyebrow as he leaned back against the island with taco in hand. “Moderation, huh?”

Really, I should have been cross at that. I would have, back in the day. But, for some reason, I didn’t feel even tempted to get angry. It was all part of the game. “Any numb I could find. But I’m clean now.”

“Damn right.” Gilbert raised his glass to me. Alfred did, too, smiling with sauce on his lips.

It brought me right back to the party. Was that last night? It felt like years ago. I didn’t want to feel like that again, or think about it. So I said, “No toasts, gents. It’ll go to my head. I’ll start acting like a rockstar or something.”

Sebastião’s laugh was the only drug I didn’t feel guilty about.

 

* * *

 

Because we had the audience of Alfred and Sebastião, we decided—well, I decided and Mick and Gil agreed, just the way it used to be—to try a rough run-through of the fuck song. Alfred was staring at my rack of guitars, so I asked, “Do you two want to play with us?”

Alfred’s eyes widened with horror. “No! I mean, no. I can’t play any instruments. Sorry.”

Gilbert grinned, slicing his sticks together like he was sharpening blades. “Imagine that. Someone declining to play with the Fail Brothers Band.”

Mikkel grinned right along with him. “Sacrilege.”

I slung my guitar strap over my shoulder. “I’m glad you two said it. Would’ve been worse coming from me.” I stepped over to Alfred. “You’ve got hands and feet, haven’t you?”

He glanced down at his feet. “Uh, yeah.”

I got him stomp-clap-stomping and glanced at Sebastião, who was watching with a faint smirk. I didn’t think our game involved me trying to get him stomping, so I just let him lounge gorgeously the couch while Alfred dutifully set out our starting beat. I plugged Black Beauty in and turned the volume up just enough to scare Alfred when I picked the first note. This song was inspired by a fan I’d had the pleasure (and displeasure, afterward) of meeting in a hotel parking lot. I was a bit worried she’d know it was about her, but I suspected by now she’d moved on to musicians who didn’t disappear for a year.

_Brand-new set of headlights, those high beams are real_

_Grab the stick, darling, let’s go into top gear_

_I’m shifting, she’s drifting, we’ll make the tires squeal_

_We’re about to crash and she likes it head-on_

_So she’ll take the wheel while I stab it and steer_

Alfred shied back when Gilbert’s drums drowned him out. I expected him to blush at the lyrics, but he seemed too shaken by the noise level to worry about double entendre. Then he surprised me by laughing; it was rather impressive to be able to laugh louder than two guitars and a German with a drum kit. Sebastião didn’t laugh, but he was doing his smirky smile. Whoever preferred Antonio’s good boy look was out of their mind.

Gilbert stopped drumming, then started again, with a slightly faster tempo, more flash. Mikkel and I both nodded to him. Some songs came together quick, some slow. Piece by piece, we’d get there. It was only when multiple alternatives sounded good that things got tricky. Or when I couldn’t find the right words to sing. That happened more often now. Now that we’d had an album a lot of critics called _vapid, cashing in on too much emo culture, glorifying self-harm and depression._ Now that I couldn’t write things for Marianne anymore.

No. That wasn’t it. It wasn’t that I couldn’t write them for her. It was that she wouldn’t be listening to them backstage, or in my car, or in this room, my headphones on her ears, my arms around her waist, my lips on her neck—

My fingers fumbled, and Black Beauty’s strings buzzed hideously.

Gilbert and Mikkel’s eyes were on me.

Alfred’s smile faded, looking worriedly from Gilbert to Mikkel like _Is he okay? What happened? What do we do?_

Only Sebastião’s face, a lazily content pre-smirk with a hint of amused sparkle to the eyes, was unchanged. He rested his ankle on the opposite knee, crossed his arms behind his head, and asked, “What’s the working title for this one, Arthur?”

He was pretending it was fine. Because it was fine, wasn’t it? _Fake it ’til you make it._ Nothing was wrong—nothing was wrong enough to ruin my day. I could have a memory that made me feel sad, but I didn’t have to fall apart. That sounded normal. Unfamiliar, but normal.

“ _Fender Bender Over_ ,” I replied.

It took Alfred a moment, then he giggled. “That’s awful.”

“Give us a better one,” I said. “Go on, then.”

He thought about it, then snapped his fingers and pointed at me, utterly pleased with himself:“ _Backseat Heat_.”

Gilbert and Mikkel nodded slowly, so I said what we were all thinking. “That sounds like an air freshener. Or a condom brand.”

“Well, hey, it’s about sex, right?”

“ _Four-doorgasm_ ,” Mikkel said.

“ _Automosteal Her Virginity_ ,” Gilbert said.

“You two are worse than Arthur,” Sebastião said.

They were all laughing, smiling. I was smiling, too, I could feel it on my face. They were happy. I was happy, and I could almost feel it, but mostly I was thinking about how much better this would be with coke, because my best work came from coke. Our second album, the one everyone liked best, was written (and sometimes performed) with cocaine making everything crisp and attainable. It was bittersweet to remember how I’d started out, new blood, excited about how the process worked, delighted with each new milestone we reached. But I’d become jaded, inevitably, and my drive had come from coke after that. Well, from coke, and from— _Sing me something lovely, Arthur. Sing me something beautiful._

God, she was like a bloody lost tooth.

Sebastião broke off from laughing with the others to look at me, and I saw his smile fade, something serious coming to his brow. He pushed to his feet. “Why don’t you take a break and give me a tour of this place?”

“Ooh, I was offered a tour,” Alfred said, smiling. “Can I still come?”

I expected Mikkel and Gilbert to be giving each other looks, but they just nodded to me. “Go ahead,” Gilbert said. “Your part is pretty much finished, anyway. We’ll see what we can put together.”

“Alright, then.” I left my guitar behind and led the guests out of the recording room.

We went around the ground floor first, showing the kitchen I barely used and the dining room I never used and the sitting room I’d never actually used for relaxing, just for getting loud and drunk. Then we went upstairs, where we explored guest bedrooms (one of which Feliciano and Ludwig had stayed in once, so God knew what those walls had seen) and finally my own bedroom. Having Alfred and Sebastião in here, looking at my bare walls and plain furniture, I realized how empty this whole place was. This wasn’t Mikkel’s nice house or Gilbert’s comfortable home. This wasn’t lived-in. This was an empty zoo exhibit.

“I didn’t need something massive,” I said, because I needed something to say.

Sebastião glanced at me over his shoulder. “This is a mansion.”

“Well.” I shrugged. “It’s a small mansion.”

Alfred’s phone went off, playing a song from the early 2000s that I’d been happy to forget existed until now. “Oops. Sorry. Mattie’s calling me.” He put the phone to his ear. “Hello? . . . Gil isn’t answering his phone?” His eyes went to me.

“He’ll have his phone off,” I replied. Muscle memory from recording days. “Interference with the mics.”

Alfred passed this information along, then smiled apologetically at us and stepped out of the room, saying, “I know it’s their anniversary tomorrow but I dunno what to get, Mom already has enough vases . . .”

I sat down on the end of my bed, patting the mattress. Sebastião sat beside me and nearly fell backward. “Okay, waterbed,” he said, righting himself. “Good to know.”

I stifled a grin into a smirk. “It’s good for your back, except when your throw out your sciatica sitting down.”

The game continued. “How many people have been on this bed?”

“Counting you and me? Three.” I took out my phone. “Actually, five. We used it for an album cover.” Our second album, of course. It was a shame when your magnum opus turned out to be the second thing you did. I showed Sebastião the cover of _All Dressed Up (And Nowhere to Go)_ which featured all of us lying on my bed: Gil in a suit jacket, Mick in a waistcoat, and someone named Arthur Kirkland in just a tie, looking up at the camera like he was about to be ravished or ravish someone and he wasn’t fussy about it either way.

Sebastião nodded, eyes lingering on 2D me. “I remember.”

“So you have heard my music, then.”

“I was a fan.”

I arched an eyebrow at him. “Not anymore?”

He arched an eyebrow right back at me. “Depends how good your new album is.”

“Tsk. I thought you might be a diehard. You seemed like the passionate Spaniard type.”

Sebastião shook his head, scowling. “Don’t confuse me with my brother.”

I gave him as serious a smile as I could. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” I tilted my head to the side. “Why do you hate him?”

Sebastião leaned back on his hands. “He’s the perfect one everyone loves. I’m the Carriedo brother the hipsters like. Nobody else knows I exist.”

“Oh yeah? So you’re what Gil used to be.” I suspected Gilbert would still be referred to as _that guy who plays drums for FBB_ if not for his distinctive appearance. No one could spell his surname, but that was just to be expected when you were German. “But hey, Gil wound up with a cute boyfriend.”

He sat up. “How cute are we talking here?”

I found Alfred on Facebook. Matthew was in his friends list, but his profile was private, so I had to go into Alfred’s photos to find one with the both of them. Sebastião leaned closer to me, his shoulder against mine. Looking down at my phone, our faces were only inches apart. I realized I was holding my breath, so I did my best to not do that.

“Pretty adorable,” he admitted. “Fuck Gil.”

“Fuck Gil,” I agreed. “Really.”

We looked at Matthew and Alfred in silence for a moment.

“Not really my type,” Bas said.

“Not mine, either,” I said immediately.

“What do you like?”

“Longer hair. You?”

“Green eyes.”

“Ditto.”

“Nice lips.”

“Thanks.”

Then we were looking at each other, and he was smiling and I was smiling, and our faces were still a few inches apart, and then they were two inches apart, and then just one.

And then Alfred came back in. “Sorry about that! Uh, you guys good?”

I jumped to my feet, as did my heart, or at least it felt like it did. “Yeah. Of course. Why wouldn’t we be?”

Alfred smiled, bemused. “I dunno. Anyways. Gil and Mick want you back to run through the song.”

Sebastião got slowly to his feet, eyes on my lips. “Let’s hear it, rockstar.”

So we went back to the recording room, and Gilbert’s drums were nearly perfect and Mikkel’s bass was playing itself and Black Beauty wanted to get everyone listening pregnant, and I sang the words I knew and added in some I didn’t, and it was the kind of irreverent, just-short-of-filthy song that made our fans bare their teeth and rip off their shirts at concerts. I looked at Bas and sang about pulling hair and screaming over the engine, and he looked back at me with a smirk on his lips and what looked an awful lot like lust in his eyes.

It wasn’t perfect, but nothing had ever been perfect. It was music. We were making music, at last.

When the drums and bass had fallen silent and the black guitar had lulled to quiet, Alfred gave us an eager round of applause. Sebastião didn’t clap, but he stepped over to me and offered a fist. A bit breathless, I knocked my knuckles against his.

He gave a small smile, just for me, and said, “I’m still a fan.”


	6. Chapter 6

The next morning, Alfred and Matthew were busy taking their parents somewhere to celebrate their anniversary with food and dishware, and Gilbert was busy going to the gym with Ludwig (they invited me to join them but _that_ wasn’t happening anytime in the current century), and it was Sebastião’s turn to text me but he hadn’t yet, so I had no choice but to go to IKEA with Mikkel and Bjorn.

I’d never been inside an IKEA, so I was expecting a wonderland of colors and shapes, which turned out to be pretty accurate. Rooms and rooms and rooms, separated like testing chambers for human experiments. _Here is one potential reality. Here is another. Would you prefer this one? What would your life be like if you had paisley print on your duvet?_ I was staring at a couch so hideously orange it must have been a cautionary tale for something when I walked into Mikkel’s back. “Bloody hell. Fix your brake lights, mate.”

He barely reacted. I walked round him, and this was what had stolen both his and Bjorn’s attention: a little room with a small cot, fluffy clouds on the wall, pink-and-blue polka dots on the soft rug, and at least six teddy bears placed strategically for maximum cuteness.

“Child room,” I told them. “Please stop creepily staring at it.”

Bjorn looked at me scoldingly. “Not everything needs to be a shallow joke, Arthur. Some things are actually important and meaningful.”

And that made me feel like cringing in embarrassment, and _that_ made me feel angry that he knew me so well when I barely knew anything about him beyond how unacceptable he was. “Maybe you shouldn’t take things so seriously,” I told him, then added because it sounded catchy, “Maybe that’s part of the problem, too.”

Bjorn looked up at Mikkel, who—to my absolute delight—gave a small shrug that said _Well, ah, well, you are a little, you know, serious sometimes, lover dearest._ Bjorn pressed his lips together, exhaled, then said, “Alright. Let’s just call it a draw.”

Which was precisely what I was thinking, and I fooled myself into thinking maybe Bjorn was capable of relatable human thought until he dragged Mikkel over to the baby and young child guff and started comparing prices on cots and cribs. Why did Bjorn feel the need to plan ahead so far that he had to know the prices of things he wouldn’t be buying for _years_? It didn’t shock me that they wanted to have a kid. I’d known that about Mikkel since we met; it had been a surprise, the first time, when I was joking about the horror of getting someone pregnant and Mikkel said he wouldn’t mind having a family one day. I remembered it as a Moment of Growth: the realization that punks could be loving and caring and all that sticky sweet nonsense. I used to have a lot more Moments of Growth when I was still a teenager. Now that I’d crossed over to adulthood it was mostly Moments of Disappointment and Moments of Regression when drugs got involved.

I could only listen to Bjorn—talking about what curtains would work best in the spare room, sounding just like my mother—for five minutes before I started drifting. I wondered what I would say to a younger me, if I met him in IKEA. Would I warn him not to pick up a guitar? It wasn’t that music was the problem. Music might have been the opposite of the problem. I just couldn’t tell which one was inevitable. Would I have ended up famous regardless of intervention? Or would I have ended up ruined by drugs?

The truth was that before and after the music, I was still a faulty mechanism. I knew that. Maybe even that little boy singing in the choir could hear the evil voices in his ears. Why else would he sing so loud?

A baby was crying. I thought I’d actually lost my mind for a moment, until I turned around and realized there was a family standing a few feet away: mother, father, wailing tot, teenage daughter. I watched the father retrieve the fallen dummy, wipe it clean, and set it gently into the gaping toothless maw. Just like that, all was quiet. I tried to imagine Mikkel doing that. It wasn’t impossible. I wondered what that made me. Uncle Arthur? That didn’t sound too terrible, actually . . .

I waited until the family had turned their backs to look at some Swedish crib, then lifted a hand to wave at the baby. It watched me with big blue eyes, sucking on its soother. I gave it a smile, one without teeth just in case it got jealous that I had some and it didn’t yet. It smiled back around its dummy, lips pink and shiny with drool, stupidly adorable. I wondered if I was ever as inoffensive as this little creature.

“. . . about this color for his room?” the mother was asking.

The father made a noncommittal but convincingly thoughtful sound to acknowledge that he was listening—marriage, ladies and gentlemen—and the teenage daughter muttered, “Whatever.”

This was starting to get too much like a commercial, or a B movie. I was about to turn away and try to find my Scandinavians when the daughter glanced up and caught a glimpse of me. She did a double take, eyes flying open. And there it was, the point of no return. “Holy. Shit.”

“Language!” her father snapped. Her mother had the audacity to give me an apologetic look.

The girl ignored them, flapping her hands. She couldn’t have been older than fourteen, and her voice was going squeakily high. Everything ran together on an inhale of disbelief. “Ohmygodohmygodareyoureallyyou?”

“Well . . .” I glanced down at myself. “Is that a philosophical question?”

Her voice hit a note I hadn’t been able to since I was eight. _“Yourvoiceohmygoditisyou!”_

A thought bubble bearing the message _W T F ?_ appeared above her parent’s heads.

“Mom, this is Arthur Kirkland!” the girl said, and I was pleased that she said it like it should mean something to anyone on this planet. “From FBB!”

“From what?” her mother asked. She and the father were staring at me in utter bewilderment.

I wondered if this episode was telling of my old demographic or my current one.

“So—” The girl had abandoned her squealing and had now assumed a self-deprecating tough gal posture. “So can I, like, hug you, or is that not a cool punk thing?”

I debated my response, then just smiled at her and held out my arms. “Yes.”

As we engaged in a slightly sweaty but pleasantly squishy hug, I could feel her quivering against me. She hugged me like she was afraid to touch me and like she wanted to burrow under my skin at the same time, and I knew from just this feeling that she would go home tonight and think about this and hate that she was wider than me and her skin wasn’t perfect and her hair probably should have been brushed this morning. I wanted to tell her that none of that mattered, but whispering to a thirteen-year-old that she’s beautiful was probably not a good idea. So, instead, I asked, “Can I give you an autograph?”

She pulled back. “Ohmygodyes.” She whirled on her mother. “I need something to write on. Where’s your shopping list?” She dug through her mother’s purse. “What the hell, the _one time_ you don’t have a list? Seriously?”

I could see her mother was about to snap at her again, so I plucked the _$269.99_ price tag off a crib, took a pen from my pocket, and wrote on the back of the tag: _Don’t forget._ Now I stopped. The idea of writing something deep was much better when it was just an idea. What did I want her to remember? How could I write it without seeming daft, or saccharine? I wasn’t going to tell her I loved her. I didn’t want to lie to her. I could just remember Bjorn telling me some things were meaningful. He would know what to write, and it wouldn’t sound wrong coming from him.

Why could I never remember writing something special for an autograph? People sometimes requested things, which I usually obliged, if there was time. Too often there wasn’t; I ended up scrawling illegible signatures over whatever surface was in front of me, over and over again until we got clear of the swarm. This, meeting one singular fan in a quiet place with nothing but our mortal lives to end the session, was so foreign I had no idea how to properly conduct myself.

The girl was watching me with bated breath, so I asked, “What’s your name, love?”

She held her hands to her chest with a look of joy on her face like I’d just given her a puppy. “Amelia.”

Of course her name was Amelia. _Oh, fuck it. Just be honest._ Like that was an easy thing, when I wasn’t hiding behind screaming guitars and pounding drums. _She won’t care what you write, anyway._ I finished my little note and actually took my time with my signature for once, then offered the price tag to her. “There you are. Now it’s worth a grand.”

Her father perked up. “Really?”

Amelia and I both stared at him, incredulous. “No.”

I didn’t get to see Amelia’s reaction to my message— _Don’t forget, you’re you, Amelia - Don’t try too hard, poppet, you’re doing great already_ —because my phone buzzed. It was Mikkel, informing me that he and Bjorn were waiting at the door, wherever that was. “Hate to say it, but I’ve got to go.”

Oh, the heartbreak in Amelia’s eyes that she would not get to go riding off into the sunset with me. I would not be sweeping her off her feet and paying for all her clothes (please, Internet, stop writing fanfiction about my credit cards). Her vacation from real life was ending now. It actually got to me a little, for some reason—no reason that made sense, because if she knew what it was like spending a night with me, she wouldn’t look nearly so sad. I held an arm out. “Come on, then, a picture before I go.”

She hurried to stand beside me and held up her phone, but she struggled to frame it properly because she was shorter than me (how gloriously refreshing that was, Christ) so I took the phone from her and snapped the selfie. She was almost in tears when I handed the phone back to her. “Oh my _god._ Can I put that on Instagram?”

My own phone buzzed again.

**Any day now Kirkland**

“Alright, ta now, love. But yes to the Instagram.” I started walking away and called over my shoulder, “Just don’t tag IKEA! I have a reputation to uphold!”

Fourscore and seven years later, when I found the front door, Mikkel asked, “What the hell took so long?” Bjorn had his arms crossed over his chest and a disapproving frown on his lips, but he didn’t comment.

“Yeah, yeah. Sorry, mate.” I shook my head as we walked out to the car. “I was time travelling.”

Mikkel wasn’t too cross, though, because he smiled. “Did you go to the past or the future?”

“Both. The good news is I’m still famous in the future.”

A horn honked three times, and we all moved out of the way, but it was not an angry driver. It was three teenagers barely old enough to drive, V-signing us and rolling their windows down so the whole parking lot could hear my snarl, scratchy yet solid with the layered gang vocals.

_Watch the silver tongued devils drip dripping blue blood_

_Another death, another dollar, middle class in classy squalor_

_Shiny shoes, spiffy suits, on their knees through the mud_

_Just another slave stuck in a fucking white collar_

Mikkel and I raised our hands in rock horns, and the teenagers gleefully shouted, “FBB! FUCK BROTHERS BAND!”

Bjorn shook his head slowly. “If that’s good news, I don’t want to know what bad news looks like.”

I dropped my hand. “Listen. Lighten up a bit, yeah? Stop tempting me into sin.”

Real anger actually came into those dark eyes, and excitement crackled through my chest when Bjorn’s mouth opened, but Mikkel jumped in: “To be fair, Art has been on good behavior today. So far. Mostly.”

Bjorn looked at him, then at me, then sighed. “I guess he has.”

I got into the backseat with pride, because I was still relevant to four people at IKEA, and because I’d had what I was going to call a Moment of Growth with a girl named Amelia, and because right now, the scoreboard looked like this:

 _Brit 1_ — _Norwegian 0_

 

* * *

 

I had nowhere better to go, so I went home with Mikkel and Bjorn. I felt like their imaginary child, getting out of the back of their car and writing my name in the gravel of their driveway with my shoe while I waited for the door to get unlocked. I was pretty good practise for having children, actually—and if not, I was damned good contraception. _Warning: This Monster Could Be Yours. Use protection._

I followed them in, toeing off my DMs—it was that kind of house—and went into the kitchen. Their fridge looked like a bloody super market. Fifty shades of lunch meat, cheese, green and yellow vegetables. Anything that could be put on a piece of bread. I took a cup of tapioca pudding out— _I wonder if Bas likes tapioca_ —and closed the door. Bjorn was standing there, staring at me. I almost dropped the cup. “Jesus. You should have a bell or something.”

Bjorn’s impassive expression didn’t change. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I still felt like he disapproved of my existence. _And Mick wonders why we don’t get along._ He was out changing the oil in the car, so there was no one to referee. Bjorn cleared his throat quietly. “I’d like to talk to you.”

 _Oh, great._ I busied myself opening every drawer except the one with the cutlery in it. “Oh yeah? About what?” I opened a drawer full of knitted dishcloths and oven mitts. I held up a mitt done to look like the head of a duck, or maybe a chicken: white, with a black eye and an orange beak where the thumb was. I made it cluck and/or quack while my other hand held the cold tapioca. “Where did you get this?”

Bjorn snatched the duck/chicken off my hand, put it back in the drawer, and shoved the drawer shut. Something was snapping in those dark blue eyes. _And they say blue is a calming color._ Those eyes had killing oceans in them. I suspected I wasn’t the first sailor to drown in them, one way or another.

Suddenly, right before he spoke, I wondered what he’d been like five years ago, ten. He couldn’t have always been censored and sensible like this. Would we have gotten along when he was fiery? Or would we have just killed each other faster?

“I want to talk about you,” he told me tightly. “And about your future.”

Wow.

I opened the proper drawer to retrieve a spoon. “You’re giving me flashbacks to the last time someone said that to me. They’re not pretty flashbacks.”

They really weren’t. My father was quite ugly, all things considered. I’d taken after my mother, appearance-wise. She gave me the face. He gave me the hair. They both contributed to the madness. And the voice, now that I thought about it. They liked to shout. Especially when I told them I was not, under any circumstances, going to law school. Oh yes, that was quite the night. Gilbert had given me an ice pack wrapped in cloth for my eye and Mikkel insisted I press charges, but I wasn’t interested. Insult to bloody injury: hiring a lawyer after refusing to become one. That was the night I left home for good, moved in with Gil and Mick. Legally, my parents could’ve come after me, forced me to come home. Showed they cared about me. Proved they actually wanted me.

Yeah. Not so much.

Bjorn tapped two fingers on the countertop, watching me sidelong like I was a complicated machine and he was looking for the off switch. “Let’s go sit down. It’s easier to talk sitting down.”

So I took my depression and my tapioca into the living room and sat down with it on the couch. Bjorn sat on the adjacent loveseat. The telly stared at us both, expectant. I wanted to turn it on. I wanted to go lie down on the hood of Mikkel’s car and close my eyes and feel dead. Neither of those things happened.

“First I want to tell you I’m glad you went to rehab,” Bjorn said. “You look a lot better than you did before. It was hard to watch you doing that to yourself.”

Maybe the right response to this was gratitude, but it rubbed me the wrong way. “But not hard enough to do anything about it, apparently.”

Bjorn sat up straighter. “No one could have done anything for you at that point. Especially not me. You won’t listen to me _now_ , let alone back then.”

I stared at him, then ate a spoonful of pudding. _Touché._

“Now I want to ask you what your plan is,” Bjorn said. “I doubt anyone else has.”

He was correct about that, because most people knew me well enough to know I didn’t make plans. I’d been making music before, so I guess I’d keep on doing that. Sebastião was an interesting development, but taking what he was seriously, the possibilities of him—it made my stomach uncertain about the tapioca. Gilbert’s nervous boyfriend and Mikkel’s hypothetical child were more guest stars on the Arthur Kirkland Show. Marianne and Antonio were the returning villains.

“You can’t just do the same thing forever,” Bjorn told me. “Life brings change, whether you’re ready for it or not.”

In other words: no one wanted to watch a show that never found a resolution. And no one wanted to be part of a show like that, either.

I swallowed some more tapioca and crossed my ankles on Bjorn’s coffee table. “Then what’s the point, pray tell, of making a plan if everything’s gonna go to shit regardless?”

Bjorn’s eye actually twitched. “Because plans lend stability. Stability keeps things from going too far off the rails. It helps you find your path again when you lose your way.” He stood up, stepped over to me, loomed. “Get your feet off the table. Act your age.”

This from a man who was only four years older than me, and barely two inches taller. One part of my brain said _Hit him._ Another part said _How dare he._ Another part said _He’s right, you know._ And the biggest part said _I just wish there was an undo button._

I took my feet off the table. I put my pudding down. I stood up and looked Bjorn in the eye.

“First I want to tell you I don’t like you,” I told him.

He didn’t even roll his eyes.

“Now I want to ask you why you care,” I said. “Because as far as I know, you don’t like me, either.”

Bjorn arched an eyebrow, and it was so depressing to be watching him do it instead of Sebastião that I would have flipped that damned coffee table and sent the tapioca flying if I didn’t think Mikkel would make me clean up the mess.

“Well,” Bjorn said lightly, “do you often like people who hate you?”

That gave me pause. “Not really. But that can’t be the only reason you don’t like me.”

Bjorn carefully crossed his arms over his chest. He wasn’t ripped, but he was still fit because he did cardio, which meant if a bear chased us he would get away and I would get eaten, and that was just as bad as being ripped. “Alright, if you want me to be honest, I will. You’re not the type of person I would normally associate with. You’re hedonistic, selfish, disrespectful, and shallow.”

I looked down at the plastic cup on the table. “Well, now I don’t even want my pudding.”

Bjorn made a brief, guttural noise of pure frustration. “And you’re immature. You take nothing seriously.”

“No.” I lifted my chin. “Incorrect. I take _everything_ seriously. I _pretend_ not to.”

Bjorn’s pale eyebrows lifted, incredulous. “And you think that’s a good thing?”

I wanted to leave. I wanted to go out with Mikkel or call Gilbert and go get some kind of sugary drink and forget about this conversation. But I didn’t, I stayed, I was making myself stay in this living room. I wasn’t running away. Bjorn had no idea how much effort it took to stand here and keep talking to him, but I was fucking doing it.

“Listen.” I covered my face with my hands. It was much easier to speak honestly like this. Too easy; I had to keep _I’m sorry I’m broken I’ve never had to fix myself before and it’s really hard okay_ from pouring out. “Imagine a bomb went off in this house. The walls were still there and the roof and the nice siding. The outside looked fine. The inside was almost totally ruined. Would you try to repair it, or would you just move to a new house?”

Bjorn’s voice came into my little darkness, shockingly soft. “Arthur. You can’t move. There’s only one you.”

I tore my hands from my face. I expected my voice to be ragged, but I didn’t expect it to crack into a barely there whisper. “Exactly.”

Those blue eyes could be so sad. How could Mikkel stand seeing them like that? _Is that why he tries so hard to make him happy?_ I wanted—Jesus Christ. I wanted warm arms, safety, someone to smile only for me. I’d been that for someone, once, but I wasn’t good at it. What was wrong with me? I’d known Bjorn for six years, and I’d never actually looked at him.

Bjorn lifted a hand toward me, slowly, like he thought I might bite. When I didn’t, he let it rest on my shoulder, palm warming me through my shirt. “No matter if you clean it all up at once or a bit at a time, the mess will go away eventually. Just keep trying. You’ll get there.” He inclined his head a little to me. “And I’m sorry, if I’ve been making it more difficult for you. I can be . . .”

“A stuck-up prick,” I offered.

He blinked. “. . . a bit headstrong.”

I nodded. “Sure, just a bit.”

“So we’ll both try to make this work,” he said. “I’ll stop trying to cure you, and you’ll . . .”

“I’ll make a plan,” I said, and stretched my mouth into a smile. “Just for you, Best Friend Bjorn.”

Bjorn cringed. “Please don’t call me that.”

I let the smile vanish without a trace. “Ugh, thank God.”

He let go of my shoulder and instead held out the hand. “But do share the plan with me when you figure it out. Or I could help you, if you wanted.”

I was tempted to use the gloved one, but I went with the tattooed hand instead. “You’ll be the first one to know if I come up with anything.” I wanted to give him a brutally hard handshake, but I was worried it wouldn’t be impressive enough and he’d just raise his eyebrow again, so I just gave a bog standard one and picked my pudding back up again.

Mikkel finally came in, hands a bit grubby, smiling at us. “What are you guys up to?”

“Making friends,” I replied, putting a spoonful of tapioca between my lips.

Mikkel glanced at Bjorn for verification, and the nod he received had a grin lighting up the living room. “Art’s being so well-behaved, he must want something.”

What I really, really wanted was to get a text from Sebastião expressing that he was in bed and wanted company, and then I wanted to crawl under his blankets and find out if the hint of auburn in the hair on his head was present elsewhere on his body.

“Ja,” I said, holding out the empty cup. “I want more of your pudding.”

So Mikkel got me another cup of tapioca pudding, and we sat in his living room all on the same couch with his arms around me and Bjorn, and we made fun of reality TV shows, and I didn’t get jealous and Bjorn didn’t get snobby, and we actually enjoyed our time together until Gilbert showed up to take us to work.

But Bas still didn’t text me, so my scoreboard was back to zero.


	7. Chapter 7

_Marianne._

She was on my bed, lying on her back, a white gauzy dress slipping over her legs. Waiting for me. She smiled at me, so gorgeous, so fucking gorgeous. “You’re home.” She held her arms out to me, so I went to her, climbed on top of her, and kissed her. I could feel her everywhere, lined up with every inch of me. So good . . .

A baby cried.

I lifted my head, but she pulled my chin back down and we kissed again, and we kept kissing. The crying was getting louder. I needed to go, but she felt so fucking good against me, like the definition of right, and yet I needed to go. Reluctantly, I pulled back and told her, “I need to see if it’s okay.”

She glared at me, furious. I expected her to speak, to argue with me like she always did. But she just pushed me off of her and sat up, dug her fingertips into her flesh and tore her chest open—except it wasn’t her chest, it was the bed, the mattress. Water rose, hot and thick as blood, and I could see right through it as Marianne drowned, but I couldn’t move and I couldn’t breathe and why did I have to fucking ruin everything?!

I woke up, breathless, hot and sweaty and still half-hard. The bed was impossibly cold and empty on the other side, Marianne’s side. I shivered. I felt sick. My hand shook as I picked up my phone. 3:41 AM. For the first time since the crash, I let myself truly miss her. I knew who I was, when I was with her. _God._ Oh, it hurt. I actually regretted deleting all her photos from my phone; I remembered doing it, fumbling between painkiller doses in my hospital bed. I googled Arthur Kirkland and the fill-ins were _fbb, age, rehab, gay, girlfriend._ I tapped the last one and scrolled through photos of us. We hadn’t been private about our relationship, but we hadn’t flaunted it, either. Most of the pictures were from paparazzi: holding hands walking in front of a Starbucks, sitting on a park bench together. Then there were stills from a vlog Gilbert made during the third album’s recording, when Marianne and I were celebrating our two-year anniversary, a video I was most definitely not going to watch. I tapped a GIF and watched Marianne kiss my cheek over and over again, watched myself smile over and over again. Thirty frames of love.

I opened YouTube and found the vlog. I’d just gotten done recording backing vocals, so I was coming out of the booth with headphones around my neck when Gilbert the cameraman came in with a cake. Kiku mumbled something about keeping frosting off his tech. Mikkel laughed from a couch in the background. Younger Me looked at the camera, incredulous. “It’s not a fucking birthday party.”

The camera shook a little as Gil laughed. “It’s a wedding.”

My eyes went round and Marianne stepped into the frame, leaning close to kiss my cheek, amused and fond. “Give him another year or two for that.”

She hadn’t lasted another year. I could hear her now, shouting at me, ugly shouting like I’d never heard before: _if I meant something to you, maybe you wouldn’t fuck anything that opens its legs!_ I had to shove the tears off my lashes with my knuckles so I could see the screen. We were all laughing and drinking and eating cake. Happy people happy to be with each other. _Why do I have to ruin everything . . ._

It was a bad idea to get out of bed.

I did it, anyway.

I turned a lamp on, looking at the spot where Marianne stood when she yelled at me. I walked over to touch the wall. You’d never know how hard she threw that curling iron at me. Smooth and perfect. I wondered if Alfred fixed that, or if someone else replastered and repainted. A curious balance: I was rational enough to use my strumming hand rather than my fretting hand, but not rational enough to not put my fist through the wall. Try to, anyway. I made a small dent and my knuckles cracked and my wrist felt pretty not-nice. I couldn’t even destroy things properly. _Except myself._

I looked at the lamp, looked at the wall, wondered which would last longer. Then I left the room. _New day, new day. Tomorrow is a fresh start. Just get through the night._ Why were the nights so damned hard? _Because they’re empty. You’re alone. You’re not partying or drinking or buzzing or sleeping like everybody else. You’re awake and you’re wrong and you’re fucking alone._ I looked over the railing in the foyer, past the glowing red guitar to the shadowy floor. One storey was a waste of time. I’d just end up paralyzed, even if I did go headfirst. _Arthur. There’s only one you._ But there was only one anybody. How could they stand it? How could other people stand this?

I had to call someone. Bjorn had offered help, but I knew he didn’t mean crazy talk at four in the morning. I’d already kept Alfred awake once this week. Gilbert was probably snuggling with his boyfriend. _Fuck it._ I had to. I called Bas.

And, amazingly, after it rang and rang and rang, Sebastião picked up. For a split second I was petrified I’d hear moaning or crying in the background and I’d have to hang up and make Bad Choices. But then Bas just said groggily, “Qué? I mean. Fuck. Yeah?”

I actually almost laughed. It was so wonderful to hear his voice, and to hear Bas’s brain autocorrect to the wrong language. “Thank you.”

He sounded more awake after he cleared his throat. “For what?”

“I called you because I needed you to make me feel better like you did the other night,” I replied. “And you did.”

I heard shuffling sounds, like he was sitting up in bed. Then he said, “That was pretty quick. The other night it took singing to make you feel better.”

My heart didn’t shiver; it perked up, like dog ears. “I wouldn’t be opposed.”

There was a sleepy smile in his voice. “Then I guess I’ll get my guitar.”

So I ended up nestled back in bed with my phone on the pillow beside mine, listening to Bas sing and strum. He sang Spanish and English songs, but I hadn’t heard any of them. It calmed me down regardless, just like before, a soothing balm. Somewhere along the way, I heard myself say, “I thought you got sick of me. I wouldn’t blame you.”

Bas sounded surprised. “I figured _you_ were sick of _me._ Or you weren’t interested in more than sex. You never texted or anything.”

“It was your turn to text me.”

A pause, then a beautiful raspy laugh. “You’ve been dating too many girls.”

“Yes, that is what my problem is,” I said, deadpan aided by the ungodly hour. “You’re right.”

He laughed again, and then it was just him breathing and me breathing.

Softly, I said, “I’m sorry for using you.”

“If I felt used, I would say so. This goes both ways, you know.” Sebastião’s tone was gentle now, wrapping around me like the blankets. “You make me feel better, too. You have for a long time. Your music helped me through a rough patch years ago. Now you’re helping me through another one.”

I wanted to ask about those rough patches, but I could feel how heavy my eyelids were, and I knew I had two choices: fall asleep, or stay up and be overtired and get a headache. I wanted my fresh start tomorrow. So I said, “I’m sorry again. I have to go.”

He was trying to hide it, but I heard the faint hint of disappointment in his voice. “Alright.”

“I don’t want to hang up, though.”

“I’ll do the hanging up, how about that.”

I sank back into my pillow, letting my response out on an exhale: _“Okay.”_

I closed my eyes, waiting for his goodbye. Instead, I heard gentle picking, the most delicate of fingertips on strings, and Bas’s voice, singing at a whisper, husky and thin, no bass to it at all, like his words were mist creeping through the phone. What he sang must have been a lullaby because the melody was light, so light, and sweet, so sweet . . .

My heart barely had time to feel itself fall in love before I fell asleep.

 

* * *

 

I slept in until nearly noon the next day, which I hadn’t even been fond of doing when I was a teenager because it left me feeling like I’d wasted time. Even if I wasn’t doing anything that day, at least I was awake and aware. I’d cared a lot about being awake and aware, back then. There’d actually been a time—albeit a brief one—when I was unwilling to get drunk around strangers because I was afraid of what my body would do when I wasn’t in control of it.

That was so long ago. Twenty-six-year-olds weren’t supposed to feel this ancient.

The kitchen was still a wasteland, so I looked for Alfred. He didn’t come when I knocked on his door; instead, I found him at the gate, doing something to the locking mechanism with a screwdriver. “Morning, Mr. Kirkland,” he said, glancing at me and then glancing again, bemused, because I was wearing a shirt with my face on it. (And Gil and Mick’s faces, too. And FBB writ big. It was a fine piece of clothing.)

“Morning,” I replied. “Feel like going to get groceries?”

“Um—”

“Good, we’ll go as soon as you’re finished with the—that thing.”

Alfred turned to look at me. “I mean . . . I don’t want to be rude, but . . . driving you around wasn’t in the agreement . . .”

I stared at him. Not my dark and brooding look. My slightly confused, waiting for the heartbreak of rejection look. _Don’t do this. Don’t ruin my fresh start._ “Do you want more money? I’ll give you a raise. I’ll give you . . .” I couldn’t even remember what I was paying him.

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, no, I don’t need a raise. You pay better than most places like this would.”

 _Good to know._ “Is it just that I’m using you?” I asked. _I am useless._ “I’m sorry. You don’t have to drive me around. You probably have plans for this afternoon.”

“Well.” He rubbed the back of his neck, looking at me with puppy dog eyes. “Yeah. I do.”

“Oh.” I nodded, stepping backward. “That’s fine. Enjoy them. I’ll just call a cab.”

“Sorry,” he said, looking and sounding genuine. “I know it’s not, like, your fault—”

“It is. I drove under the influence. That’s what happens.”

We both stood in silence, wincing at how bitter I sounded. I needed that good mood to stay until I went to sleep. I’d already texted Bas to find out if he was busy today—which he was, going to a motorcycle show that he didn’t invite me to, probably because he knew I really needed to get work done—so things probably wouldn’t be great. Fine was the level I was aiming for.

“Okay,” I said, clapping my hands together. “You do that. Have your. Plans. Have a good day. See you around.”

“You have a good day, too,” Alfred said, smiling apologetically before turning back to his work.

I hadn’t asked him if he wanted anything. _There,_ I thought, looking up cab numbers like the impotent peasant I was, _take that._

 

* * *

 

I was trying to decide how much tapioca pudding was too much—somewhere in between five and ten packs, but that left a lot of room for error and I didn’t want anyone to open my fridge and think I had some sort of problem—when my phone rang. It was Liz.

“A little bird told me you’re out,” she said. She was in a car; I could hear the road noise. “How does it feel?”

I had no idea why everyone kept asking me that. Was I supposed to say I felt free? Freedom was not what I needed right now. The lack of it had given me a whole lot less to worry about. “It feels great. Really releases the serotonin.”

“Uh-huh. I don’t know if anyone told you, I’ve been on vacation.”

A few feet away, a couple my age were shopping and the woman kept squinting at me. I couldn’t tell if she was debating who I was or judging me for my amount of pudding. I put one more pack into my trolley—for a total of seven—and went on my way. “Nope, nobody tells me anything. Where did you go?”

“Roderich wanted to visit family in Austria. We stopped in Italy on the way back.”

“And you figured you might as well,” I said, steering into the next aisle. “Since your biggest client was out of commission.”

“I have lots of big clients,” Liz snapped, though without genuine heat. You didn’t want to see genuine heat from her, trust me. “Roderich is a bigger client than you.”

“Nobody listens to classical,” I said, stopping to let a lady with a trolley twice the size of mine go by. There was a wailing baby in the little seat thing on the front—I was being haunted by small children—and a bigger kid following behind. He looked at me sadly, but I couldn’t sympathize with him; if his boat was sinking, mine was sunk long ago. “Tell Rod I’m getting him a synth for Christmas. Or, whatever. Hanukkah.”

“Oh, Arthur,” she said, like some wise old man. “Arthur, Arthur, Arthur.”

I hated wise old men. Especially when they were middle-aged Hungarian women.

“I don’t appear in the mirror if you say that,” I told her. “You’re thinking of someone else there.”

“Ha. Tell me you’ve been writing music.”

“Yep, lots of that happening.” I knew it was her job—she wasn’t the band’s first agent, but she was the best we’d had—but it still sort of pissed me off that she was . . . well, pressuring me, I guess. Deadlines were not my thing. As I said in an interview that felt like it happened a hundred years ago: _Art—in every sense of the word—should not be forced._ That was something good about the pub singing days. Nobody knew who we were, and we were mostly singing other people’s music, but at least no one was rushing us. Oh, that scrawny fifteen-year-old in leather trousers, voice cracking into falsetto: _So put another dime in the jukebox, baby!_ How anybody could keep a straight face back then, let alone give us money for it, I had no bloody idea.

“Oh yeah?” She sounded dubious, for God’s sake. “How much of that, exactly?”

“You want it in metric or imperial?”

“Cute. Enough to record tomorrow? Enough to have it done in a month so I can get the shit ready?”

The shit: legal paperwork, copyrights, signing off with execs, probably another contract to give another however many albums to the label since the last one helpfully ran out right before I ruined my life, marketing, setting concert dates, choreographing tours. None of which I had any interest in dealing with, at all, ever. So, Liz was a necessary evil.

“Yes to the first,” I said, putting a box of chocolates into my trolley. I’d try to give them to Sebastião, but probably I’d eat them first if things kept going the way they were. “Rain check for the second.”

“I don’t like rain checks,” she said. “And don’t think I’m the villain here. _You_ have been gone for a year. If you don’t want that to turn into forever, you need to get your album out. And you need to let people know you’re still alive. I’m going to contact some magazines—”

I made a strangled noise to illustrate how abhorrent that idea was. A passing androgynous person gave me a vaguely disgusted look. I didn’t know if that was because of who I was, the noise, or the tapioca. Maybe it was all three.

Liz huffed. “You’re such a child. Fine, no interviews. But you’re getting online and telling social media how wonderful making music is. Tell Gilbert to make some more vlogs, people ate those up. Facetime whatever you’re doing right now. Post pictures of your bedroom walls. You know, charming rockstar bullshit.”

“You really make a man feel good about himself,” I told her. “I feel spiritually connected to Rod now. Really. Make me an appointment to get circumcised.”

The androgynous person looked over their shoulder, brow furrowed in alarm, then grabbed a bag of croutons and walked quickly away. I took a bag from the shelf, dropped it into the trolley. Grocery shopping. Making this entertaining enough for people to watch would entail getting kicked out of the store for life, and despite how tempting that was, I decided against it. This was the closest store to my house, after all, and I wasn’t paying cabbies any more money than I had to.

“Don’t be like that,” she said, emphasizing the last word as if she knew there wasn’t a way around me, but if I could just not be quite so insufferable that would be great. Honestly, I could only agree with her.

“I could film it,” I said. “What entertaining rockstar bullshit it would make for.”

“I’m hanging up the phone. Go write an album people will buy.”

“Always great hearing from you.”

“I’ll be at Kiku’s studio tomorrow, and so will you,” she said, and then, out of nowhere: “Not everybody’s out to get you, Art.”

I was left staring at my phone in the middle of this rat maze, thinking about assassins and label executives (sometimes the same thing) and producers I never let fuck with my music and stagehands and sound checks and all the things that usually made my stomach twist with excitement because _it’s happening._ But now I just felt . . . nothing, really. Maybe it didn’t feel real yet. Or maybe I was just old.

I was grocery shopping. I was the only human being in this store in the middle of summer with pale skin, wearing all-black, with piercings and tattoos. There were more of my species out there, hidden in dark stores in malls and selling music to the kids that I used to be. Now I was making the music those people would sell to those kids.

Bloody hell. I did feel old.

At the checkout, the cashier gave me a dimpled smile. She was young and pretty enough that she didn’t yet have a reason to hate dealing with life. “Like pudding, huh?”

I glanced up from my phone. She had a pink headband in her caramel hair; probably someone who would listen to FBB for five seconds and say _Why does he have to shout so much?_ I smiled politely at her. “Yep, it’s great.” I dropped my gaze back to the little screen while she swiped seven packs of tapioca. I tweeted:

**Want something to listen to?**

“This is gonna sound weird,” the cashier said. She tipped her head to one side. “But you look really familiar.”

I considered looking down at myself, to direct her gaze to the much smaller and slightly faded me on my shirt. It was hard to make out the details of my face, but the resemblance was obvious once you found it. Once, I would’ve been all over her, giving her the same old _hey I’m a rockstar isn’t that the sexiest thing ever_ routine that Mikkel had used a million times, too. He’d never use it again, though. I wouldn’t use it on Bas; he’d just call me on it or raise one of those fucking eyebrows. Why should I use it on this random girl who probably wasn’t even eighteen?

I shook my head, smiling. “Yeah, I get that a lot. But, nope. Just a nobody.”

She laughed, chin ducking a little, sheepish. “Oops. Oh, well. I’m a nobody, too.” She tapped something on the keyboard. “Did you want a receipt?”

“Nah,” I replied, putting the bags back into the trolley. “I won’t be bringing anything back. Cheers, love.”

As the taxi pulled up in the parking lot, I opened Twitter again. 30 retweets, twice as many replies, in what—fifteen minutes? I didn’t know if that was a good or bad sign. Someone had written **_OMFG I CANT BELIEVE UR BACK ILY!~!!~~!!!!! #fbbreturns_  **and someone else had written **_i’m so excited i can’t even ffff when will the album be out can we know pls pls? #fbbreturns_ ** and, inevitably, someone had written **_Yeah whatever wake me up when MCR gets back together._ **

I tweeted:

**You’ll get a sneak peek later if you stay on best behavior, Internet.**

Almost immediately, someone had written **_HOLY FUCC I CAN’T WAIT!!_ **

I tweeted:

**Language, Internet.**

I also tweeted:

**@mickdensen @bathomassen I'm better at parenting than you are #suck #it #fbbreturns**


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I won't say Arthur is wearing a Speedo, but I also won't say he isn't wearing one.

I’d always liked Kiku’s studio. It wasn’t massive, but there was room to pace or lie on the floor, both of which were integral parts of my creative process. There were tiny potted trees scattered about the place, and the parking lot contained squared-off sections of white rocks, which struck me as very Japanese. He wasn’t a purist or anything, but he did have rules for anyone who came into his studio. One of those rules: _Leave your shoes on the mat at the door._ Another of those rules: _No illegal drugs, under any circumstances._ There had been a time when that particular rule was difficult for me to abide by.

Shocking, I know.

Kiku came to the door, to greet us. I’d never actually seen him go outside; if you took a black-and-white photo of him, it would look pretty much identical to a colored version. He didn’t smile, but he inclined his head to me. “You’re much more alive now, Arthur. Good to see.”

I inclined my head right back. I would’ve put my hands together, too, but that seemed like overkill or possibly racist. “Thanks, mate. You look ageless as ever.”

“Art, can you—”

I turned. Gilbert was halfway through the recurring nightmare of moving that fucking drum kit from Location A to Location B, and I had made the mistake of having a free hand. “No instrument should take up more space than a human,” I said, picking up one chunk of the bastard while Gilbert took two more. I walked quickly, because it was right on the line of too heavy but I wasn’t going to admit defeat and give the burden to Mikkel. He didn’t have a free hand, anyway, since he was carrying the tray of bevs. What would once have been beer, more beer, and whiskey was now three decaf coffees. No comment.

“Starting with you, Arthur?” Kiku asked, already working magic on his army of monitors.

“Always,” I replied, popping my case open. Black Beauty was along for the ride today, mostly because she knew how the fuck song went. I usually rotated guitars depending on the vibe of the song. Lucifer (black-and-red, referred to lovingly as LuLu by Gil and Mick) had given birth to most of the last album, so probably I wouldn’t be using him. His vibe was hating the world and wanting to die. Not what I wanted my comeback to taste like.

I stepped into the recording booth, behind glass like a criminal. All the usual suspects were here, except— _Ugh._ I almost wished I was back in the early days, before I knew how all of this worked, so I could be distracted by the busywork of plugging in amps and mics and headphones. Now I could do it in my sleep, and my mind wandered off the path, where it was bound to be eaten by wolves dressed as French girls.

“Check,” Kiku said into my ears, loud enough to make a lesser man wince.

“No need to shout, darling,” I said, adjusting the volume. “La la la la. Do I sound like a platinum record? Gilbert, bring me my coffee, would you?”

I saw Gilbert’s mouth move, but I couldn’t hear him. He came into the booth, coffee in one hand, phone in the other. I moved the headphones off one ear so I wasn’t deaf. “Apparently,” he said, handing me my cup, “there are thirty-eight people watching this right now.”

I raised an eyebrow at the beady eye of the phone’s camera. “Wow. Hello, Internet.” I sipped decaf that didn’t have enough sugar but enough sugar would’ve fucked my throat so the decaf and I were stuck with each other until the bitter, bitter end. “I hope this was all you dreamed of.”

Gilbert’s amused eyes were on his phone. “They’re asking if this is the sneak peak.”

“Yes, even though they were naughty.” Last night I’d been introduced to a plethora of Arthur Kirkland memes, all of which involved eyebrows, swearing, and drugs in some capacity. I was very disappointed the same thing did not exist for Gilbert, but I guess nobody wanted to make fun of an albino German who could deadlift, well, me. There were a few for Mikkel, mostly about his hair. Underwhelming, really, but then, there was a reason why I was the frontman. Even when I was going down in flames, I was still entertaining. I set down my coffee and slipped the pick between my fingers. “Don’t try this at home, children, or we’ll charge you a royalty.” I waved. “TTFN, Gillie.”

He flipped me off, smiling, and headed out of the booth.

And from there, it was that: recording. When I said _let’s make some magic_ , the recording process was not what I was referring to. Art wasn’t supposed to be forced, but that’s basically what we were doing now. Sing it once. Nope, louder. How about quieter? Since it again. Eh, different key. Well, if you’re going to sing it that loud, why not belt it?

“Don’t strain yourself,” Kiku said into my ears. “You can’t run a marathon without training.”

“I’m alright,” I said, clearing my throat. “It’s not like I’ve taken a vow of silence.”

Through the glass, I saw Mikkel tip his head back to laugh at the idea of it. Gilbert was still holding up his phone, so I asked, “How many watching now?”

“Almost a hundred.”

Well, in that case. “We’ll do it to D5.”

I’d hit D6 before, plenty of times. D5 was nothing. Any song that required a creepy, soft intro had me going up high, sickly cooing. My best key was C5, in my personal opinion, but I’d save the raw glory I could plumb from that for another song idea I hadn’t touched yet. It was one of those things I wanted to do right the first time, and if I spent too much time cocking around with it I’d just end up hating it.

 _Fuck song._ Yes. That’s what I was doing. I thought about the dream I’d had last night. Okay, nope, that wasn’t doing it for me. I thought about Bas, singing to me in the dark, smirking at me while I sang about pulling his hair in the backseat of his car. Imagined grinding on his lap, skin turned green by the dash lights. Wandering hands headed down, down, down as the key went up, up, up. B5, C5. Bas’s eyebrow, deliciously mocking. _Is that the best you can do? Oh, make me scream, you beautiful bastard._ C sharp, for fuck’s sake—

_Oh fuck yes baby let me take you for a riiiiiiiide!_

Ah, there we go.

When I came down to the breathless end of the song, I took a long, long drink of coffee.

“That was the best,” Kiku said. “Are you okay?”

I nodded, still drinking. “Got to keep lubricated.” Oh, my larynx was unhappy now. I glanced through the glass and was surprised to see Liz standing beside Gilbert. I raised my cup to her. “She knows all about that.”

Liz leaned to say into the mic, “You wouldn’t be so brave if I was in there. Come out, you already did it perfectly. Now it’s time to talk.”

I came out, reluctantly, and I’d barely enjoyed a fistbump of admiration from Gilbert (no longer filming; they’d had enough sneak peek) before Liz was asking me, “When do you project to be ready for your comeback tour?”

I hadn’t given dates any specific thought, because I could pretty much go at any time. Gilbert and Mikkel, having lives and whatnot, were the ones who had to make decisions about timing. So it wasn’t surprising when Mikkel answered for all of us.

“I’m not touring,” he replied. Evenly. Matter-of-fact. Sky is blue. FBB does not return.

“Excuse me?” I asked, for once wearing the exact what-the-fuck expression Liz was.

“I’m happy to stay at home with Bjorn,” he said, shrugging. “I don’t need to tour. It was fun while it lasted, but I haven’t really enjoyed a tour for years. It’s all too much, and it drains you. I’d rather travel in a way that actually lets me _see_ the places I go to.”

“Fun while it lasted,” I echoed, barely able to speak.

“It’s not like Bjorn and I are materialistic,” he pointed out, even though he did wince, just a little, when he looked at me. “We still have money left over from advances that I never used, and sales and everything else. I’ve been giving guitar lessons to kids lately. I’m sure I can find something else to do, too, if we need money once we start a family.”

I couldn’t take any more of this. “You’re _thirty-two_.”

The worst look from Mikkel. Not angry. Not even disappointed in me. Disappointed in _himself._ “Exactly. Bjorn and I want to be dads, Art. He wanted to start before we turned thirty.”

My parents were almost forty when they had me, which I guess I’d been aware was not normal, but this flavor of reality—where my brother hated himself for wasting valuable baby-making time—was almost enough to make me gag.

“I, uh.” Gil glanced at me, meek. “I don’t really wanna tour, either. I don’t want to leave Matthew that long. He’d miss me too much.”

_Then put him in a fucking kennel._

“Arthur,” Mikkel said, because he could see it. “Bjorn was right. Touring isn’t a good idea. Especially not for you.”

“Yeah,” Gilbert agreed hurriedly, because he could see it, too. “This is your fresh start. It’s time to leave touring behind.”

_FBB on its first tour! Where’re we going, Art? We’re going to Disney World! No we’re not! Honk honk, tour bus! Oh my god, what did he eat? Don’t give him that sugary shit. Where did you put my fucking hair dryer? Where is the hotel? What room is it? Holy shit, there’s a mini fridge. Gil! Did you get a mini fridge? Did we forget anything? Hey. Don’t stay up all night. No seriously go the fuck to bed. Look at this fucking vending machine. Take a picture. Well, obviously I need to be in it, too, why else would you take it? Somebody get Art a booster seat for the bus. You know what, go sit on your fucking drum sticks. Where did Mick go? He’s getting hair gel! Somebody call 911 Densen forgot his gel! Honk honk, fuck off, lady! Did we just run a red light? We’re on tour! There he goes again. Hey Art, don’t raise your eye. IT’S ONLY! Gil, why would you.TEENAGE WASTELAND!_

We were leaving that behind.

But it wasn’t only that. For every excitement, there was dread. For every happy moment with Gil and Mick, there were ten more unhappy ones with whoever was unlucky enough to be near me when my day turned sour. There was the burnout that came when we got home, or before we got home if things were going really terrible. Parties with people I either cared too much about or not nearly enough. Faceless strangers that I could only remember as legs or hands, always offering me something. Tours ruined me. I’d started off honest. Broken, but honest. Tour was where I cheated, in more ways than one. Nothing was magic. Everything was sleazy. I wasted my money on uppers and downers, while real joy and sorrow were out there, if only I’d bothered to look for them. Bjorn was right, and Marianne was right, too. Every time I went, I came back worse. I came back with hollow eyes and track marks and dyed hair and tattoos I couldn’t remember getting. I came back infected with God knew what when I was too drunk or too stupid to put on a condom. And I expected Marianne to, what, just go along with it?

I didn’t even know how many people I’d cheated on her with.

This was my fresh start.

I’d fix it. I’d keep cleaning up the mess, and eventually the disaster would be back to normal again. I was going forward, not back. That was the plan.

“We aren’t touring,” I announced. Gil and Mick looked at me in disbelief, then started to smile. Damn them both, but they actually looked a bit proud of me.

Liz did not look anywhere near proud. “The label isn’t going to like that.”

There was a very simple answer to many of life’s quandaries.

“Fuck ’em, then.” I tipped up my chin. “No label.”

She met my gaze easily. “You can’t make a living from that.”

“That’s blatantly obvious. If it was about making a living, I wouldn’t have been in fucking rehab.”

Liz’s brow furrowed. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“You heard me. No touring. Bye.” I put my headphones back over my ears and stormed back into the booth, because I needed to record some guitar before I lost my mind. “Let’s do this fucking thing.”

With this black fire in my veins, leaking into the brutality of Gilbert’s drums and the new uncaring lilt Mikkel added to the riff, it became a hatefuck song. Something you liked, even though you knew you shouldn’t. Something that made you keep coming back for more, despite the guilt. Bitter and black and jaggedly gorgeous. Not a song for the radio, but a new tune for the misfits to blast in the backseat.

And still, even with the satisfying lift that came from making music, all I could think about was: _No more touring._ I was free of my cage, but my wings were clipped. Music was no longer something I could just do forever and ever. The future was a murky horizon, but I didn’t know how to begin to navigate it. _No more touring._ These were unsailed seas, and this was the truth of it, the monster swimming up under my life raft:

This would be our last album.

 

* * *

 

After we’d recorded everything we had and Liz had left to be a buzzkill somewhere else, we went into the breakroom for drinks because our disgusting coffee was gone. Kiku didn’t even have a fridge in here, because he didn’t want to provide singers with things that might fuck their voices over. No acid, no dairy, no fizz, definitely no alcohol. All he had was filtered water, herbal tea, and honey. Pouring himself a glass of water, Gil glanced at me in concern. “Art?”

I realized I was running my fingertips over the little packets of tea. I yanked my hand back. “Give me a glass of warm.” My throat felt pretty sad. Honey would cheer it up. If only people were that easy to fix.

“Hey.” Mikkel held my wrist. After all these years, I still couldn’t believe how big his hands were compared to mine. After all these years, I’d never stopped being the little kid. Mick’s gaze was as gentle as his grasp, the rueful god looking down from on high. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”

I thought about jerking away, but I let him touch me. His hand was warm. “It’s done now.” I was so very tired of people not telling me anything. I wanted to keep this from them, but for some reason it didn’t work that way for me. I couldn’t prove what a big person I was being if I kept quiet. “This will be the last album.”

Were they shattered?

Fuck you. Of course not.

Gilbert nodded and said, “I kind of assumed it would be.”

Mikkel nodded, too, and said, “We had a good run.”

I stared at them. The band was dying. _The band. Not us._ We could still be friends, even if we didn’t make music together. We were still brothers, even if we didn’t prove it with a stage. The magazines would say we quit because the world didn’t care about us anymore. But that didn’t matter. What we wanted mattered. What was best for us mattered. _Adults make smart decisions. This is the smart decision. Nothing can last forever._ It pained me to think like Bjorn, but he was right, of course. It was time to move on.

“Well, Christ,” I said. “We’re not invalid yet. If we’re leaving, we’ll leave on a note high enough to blow the speakers out, yeah?”

Gil and Mick grinned at me. “Yeah.”

I smiled at them, then splashed my warm honey water on Mikkel’s shirt. “That’s for not telling this touring secret when I _specifically_ _asked_ for earth-shattering secrets.”

Gil laughed at Mick’s wide eyes. “That’s fair.”

“I guess it is.” Then Mikkel splashed Gilbert.

Gil staggered back, water dripping from his pale hair. “What the hell was that for?”

Mick shrugged, a giddy light in his eyes. “You were there, mostly.”

Gilbert’s eyes narrowed playfully. “Oh, I see how it is.”

They both turned to me, and I held up my hands. “Now, gentlemen, let’s not be rash—”

“But you started it,” Mikkel said innocently, leaning to fill up his glass again.

“We’re following our frontman’s example,” Gilbert agreed, stepping toward me.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes— _MY EYELINER ISN’T WATERPROOF YOU BASTARDS_ —”

“Ah, the tough rockstars at play.”

We all froze in our splashing and tussling, turning to face the door. Marianne, looking like a fucking hallucination, was standing in the doorway of the breakroom. She had a pink flower in her hair and an amused smile on her lips.

I tore myself out of Mikkel’s bear hug. “What are you bloody doing here?”

She’d been waving to Gil, but now she looked at me, brightness fading. “I’m here with Toni. He’s here to record.”

Antonio and I had sung into the same mic today? What a horrid thought. “Kiku is a traitor.”

“Kiku is the best,” Marianne said levelly. “And I’m not going to get into it, but I’m the one who should be angry.” She smiled, with those perfect teeth I’d paid for. “And look how happy I am.”

“Funny.” I wasn’t snarling yet, but give me another five minutes of this. “That sounded a lot like _getting into it_ to me.”

Marianne threw up her hands. “We were both in the wrong. Is that what you want to hear?”

“I don’t want to hear anything,” I informed her. I was burning; the water on me must be about to boil into steam. “I don’t want to hear you speak again. Ever.”

Marianne glanced sadly at Gilbert like _Well, I tried my best._ It infuriated me that she was appealing to my brothers, like they were the weary parents and she the disgruntled teacher.

Gil nodded. “Talk to you later, Mari.”

Fury wasn’t a strong enough word.

Marianne walked out and turned right, toward the recording room. I walked out and turned left, toward the door.

Gil followed, calling after me, “Where are you going?”

I didn’t say anything. I was standing in the parking lot, without my guitar case (goddamn it), without a car ( _goddamn it_ ), without any idea what I would do even if I had those things. Alfred wasn’t even home this afternoon. Where the hell could I go? I sure as hell wasn’t hanging out with Bjorn. I didn’t feel like going through the party friends—they would just talk about how desperate I was behind my back—and I really, really didn’t feel like resorting to spending the afternoon with Lars or Lovino or Ludwig. The L brigade was for good times, not _this._

Gilbert grabbed my arm, and I did jerk away this time. He moved in front of me. “What’s wrong? Why are you mad at me?”

I shook my head, crossing my arms over my chest so they wouldn’t shake. If he didn’t know why I was pissed off, he was denser than the asphalt beneath our feet.

Gil looked up at the clouds, taking a deep breath. “Don’t get mad that I talk to Marianne. Toni and Mari are my friends. We were all friends, once.”

“I have never been friends with Antonio Carriedo,” I growled. Fuck his Spanish surnames.

Gil rolled his eyes, exasperated. “Well, you know what I mean. It never bothered you that I was friends with them before. Why should it matter now? This isn’t high school. You can still be friends with someone after you break up.”

 _How the fuck would I know what high school is like?_ I didn’t spit that out, because it wasn’t his fault that I’d dropped out of school. All of a sudden, it occured to me: I was a fucking child star. And I’d wound up like they all did. Emotionally unstable, _fresh out_ of rehab. Fresh like a goddamn bullet wound.

I shook my head again, slower this time. The fight had left me. “People change.”

Gil put a gentle arm around me. His soft tone didn’t match the words: “Then you can change and stop being so angry, can’t you?”

I shoved him, hard. “Don’t be such a prick.”

He shoved me right back. It wasn’t the action that scared me; it was not knowing, as his hands came at me, whether or not he’d use all the strength he could. “You’re seriously one to talk, Art.”

Mikkel came out just then, holding our guitar cases. His brow furrowed when he saw us, but he didn’t go there. He just offered, “I’ll drive you home.”

I inhaled, exhaled. _We’re brothers. Brothers argue._ It hurt a lot less when I could forget about it, and forgetting meant drinking or smoking or snorting or shooting. I wanted to just grab Gilbert by the collar and demand, _Why is this so easy for you? Why can you talk to her but I can’t? Why?_

Then my phone buzzed. It was Bas. Excitement like lightning in my chest.

**Plans for today?**

I texted him back, then went to help carry Gil’s drums back out, which wasn’t an apology but was close enough for us.

**Come to my place. Wear something that can get wet.**

 

* * *

 

“Of course,” Sebastião said, half-naked and gloriously bronze, “you have a pool in your basement.”

I smirked up at him, already in the water. The pool had been used slightly more than my kitchen, which was to say that I could probably count the instances on one hand. But I was paying to have it cleaned and warmed, so I might as well pretend to get my money’s worth. That, and it wasn’t a great way to get guys topless or anything like that, not at all.

“Join me in my abyss,” I told him, stroking the top of the water alluringly.

He shook his head, walking down the steps and sinking into the water with me. “Is it a British thing to fill your house with water? In beds and the basement?”

I drifted backward, away from him. “Where do you think we put all the rain?”

He floated on his back, but eyed me, uncertain.

I grinned. “Nah, not really. I was just an eighteen-year-old with six figures on a cheque. This was a natural consequence, I guess.”

He looked around, thoughtful. “It’s nice.”

I swam over to the edge, reached for a remote. “Also.” I pressed a button. The overhead lights went off and lights in the pool turned on, turning us into silhouettes with blue ripples dancing over us. I pressed another button, and the lights turned purple. “Sex.” Now they turned red. “Post-sex argument.” Then back to blue. “And fun for the whole family.”

Bas raised an incredulous brow. “You have it all figured out, huh?”

I turned the overheads back on. “That wouldn’t be a criticism, would it?”

“No.” It was so refreshingly genuine. I would’ve liked to see the person who could rile Sebastião. I wondered what he would do to Bjorn. He joined me at the edge and stretched a hand toward mine. I offered the remote, but he set it down and took my fingers instead. “You don’t have your glove on.”

I didn’t look away from our hands. “Nope.”

He ran his calloused fingertips gently over my knuckles, then over the little bird on the back of my hand. It was one of my better tattoos, really; the work of threading the music notes through the feathers was lovely. If you looked closely, there was an M on its chest, where its heart would be.

“Nightingale,” I said, to break the silence. “Males without mates sing all night long.”

He nodded. “Fitting.” Mercifully, he stopped touching me and instead twisted his arm around so I could see a black bird, wings spread in flight across his tricep. “Antonio has a cage on his arm. We got them together.”

I touched the dark wings, the warm skin beneath them. “Fitting.”

He showed me a yin and yang. I showed him an ace of spades card. He showed me a rose with bleeding thorns. I showed him a rose growing out of a skull’s eye socket ( _I win_ ). He showed me three paw prints, one for each dog he’d had. I showed him my first tattoo, a guitar on the side of my thigh. I had to pull myself up onto the ledge to get my leg out of the water enough. Of course, his gaze didn’t stay on the tattoo, nor did it linger anywhere exciting. No, his eyes went right to the dark scar running along my shinbone. _Tibia._ That was just about the only bone I knew the name of. Seeing it sticking out of my skin after the crash was a good memory booster.

“That must have been intense,” Bas remarked, fingertips on my knee.

“You can touch it. Don’t worry.” I slapped the scar. “Dead as a doornail, mate. They put a rod in so it’d heal straight.”

He ran his fingers down my leg, and even though the scar was numb, I still had to stifle a shiver. “What happened?”

“You didn’t see the news reports?” I scoffed. “And you call yourself a fan.”

He smirked faintly, moving in front of me, one hand holding himself in place, the other on that guitar. “I remember hearing about a car accident, and then you were in rehab, and nobody heard anything. There were a few online theories that you were dead.”

“Wow, I’m a real celebrity now. People think I’m dead and everything.” I couldn’t believe the way his hand was making my skin feel. Tingly, overly alive. I wondered if I’d feel numb, when he stopped touching me. I wasn’t interested in finding out. “I was fucking stupid and drove drunk. And high.” And heartbroken, the deadliest drug of all. “I was under at least three different influences, put it that way. Reaction time wasn’t the greatest. Side-on collision, flipped into the ditch.” It felt like I’d told this story a million times, but it couldn’t have been that many. It felt like it had happened to somebody else, which was a good and bad thing. “Neck brace, wrapped ribs, wheelchair. A good way to avoid addiction: not being able to get up and get yourself a drink. Rehab just sealed the deal.”

Bas nodded, moving a bit closer to me. I spread my legs, and he slipped between them, hand moving round to cup my tailbone. He didn’t have lust in his eyes, though, just a quiet understanding that lulled the erratic beat of my heart. Raspily, he murmured, “Is it hard for you?”

I was looking right into his eyes, and it was almost silent in the room, and somehow I could be honest: “Yes. Especially when I’m alone.”

He tilted his head enough that his ponytail flopped forward round the side of his neck. “I thought you liked to be alone. You sing about it a lot.”

“I like to be _left_ alone.” I twirled some of his hair around my finger. “I don’t want to be by myself.”

Sebastião wrapped both arms around me; I was what kept him from drifting away. “You don’t like to be lonely.”

I could hear the song, from our fourth album. I could remember the inspiration: lying in my hotel room all day while my brothers went out and interacted with the world. They wouldn’t let me go out by myself, but they would leave me hungover by myself. ( _Fuck off out of here,_ I’d told them from beneath the covers. I hadn’t really expected them to listen.) I asked, “Who wants to be lonely?”

 _“Token toys and broken boys,”_ Bas replied, my ugly words in his beautiful voice. _“Left to dust under the bed.”_

I twined my legs round his waist. “I’d rather have you on top of the bed.”

Bas arched an _oh Jesus_ eyebrow. “Don’t remember that particular line.”

I slid a hand down, through the curls on his sternum, and over to thumb a nipple. “Consider this a remix.”

_Ah, there’s the lust._

He kissed me like a surge, and that’s what it felt like, electricity arcing out of the water and into me, burning my lips and shuddering through me. He pulled me closer and closer to him until I pushed off the ledge and we drifted through the water, kissing and kissing. I’d forgotten what it was like to feel stubble against my chin. I squeezed his waist with my thighs and felt him squeeze my arse with his hand. I kept expecting him to trail his lips downward—that’s what I’d always done. Lips, neck, tits, and then . . . well, whatever else was on offer. But Sebastião just kept going for my lips—and fuck me, his tongue knew what it was doing—so I reached down to tug on the string of his swim shorts.

He broke off, voice so huskily sexy it was a minor miracle I didn’t disintegrate into the water. “Moderation.”

I let my forehead rest against his for a moment, breathless. “Why are you such a bloody saint?”

He cupped my face with a wet hand; water trickled down my jaw. Arousal took a backseat to the solemn light in his eyes. “I don’t want to be another drug for you. If you get me all at once, sooner or later you’ll build up a tolerance. Trust me, I know. I don’t want that to happen.”

I narrowed my eyes, even though he was making a lot of sense (which wasn’t the same as being sensible, shut your damn mouth). “Well, maybe you underestimate me.”

He nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “Maybe. Or . . .” Suddenly, he ducked under the water, then came back up underneath me so I had no choice but to sit on his shoulders. His hands held my ankles, so I had no risk of falling, but I still cried, “What the hell?”

He tipped his head back so I could see his grin. “My estimate was that you weighed 125 pounds.”

I flicked his nose, but not hard enough to hurt. “I weigh 126, last I checked.”

He laughed. “Ah, so I did underestimate you.”

“You’re so intolerable. Honestly.” I let myself topple backward, eyeliner be damned.

He turned around, smiling. “So you weigh 126 pounds soaking wet.”

“Oi. If you aren’t going to fuck me, you’re not allowed to say _soaking, throbbing, wet,_ or _hard_ in my presence.”

He smirked, swimming closer to me. “Oh? Would that be distracting for you?”

By way of answer, I splashed him in the face. Then it was a deadly sword fight with pool noodles, with the English knight the winner (obviously). It was only when we were drying off that I realized: “Fuck, I’m missing a piercing.”

We both peered into the rippling depths. After a few seconds, Bas pointed. There it was, one of my helixes, floating along the bottom like a UFO. Without hesitation, Bas jumped in and dove down to pluck it up. He swam back to me, offering the ring even though I doubted he could see me through the hair; his ponytail had come undone and now a curtain of soaked hair covered his face like the fringe of a sheepdog.

I smoothed his hair back on his head and took the ring. “Thanks, mate.”

He pulled himself up out of the water, looking like some fucking male nymph, and picked his towel back up. He wrapped it around his shoulders, smiling at me—a genuine smile where our game would normally require a smirk. “You’re welcome, amado.”

I tried my best not to be disarmed by this, but I wasn’t very good at that. In fact, I almost dropped my helix into the fucking pool again. “Uh, yeah. About that. Are we . . . Is that an overly romantic Hispanic thing, or are we dating?”

Bas’s smile didn’t fade. Actually, it widened. “Are you blushing?”

“Of course not,” I said, blushing. “It’s the lights.” I snatched the remote and set the lights to red. “See?”

He nodded. “Ah, I see now. Well, it seems like we’re dating. We did have a date at the café.”

I pulled my towel tighter round me. “Was that a date?”

He shrugged, still startlingly lighthearted. “Was that not?”

I stared at him, then said, “We’re going out for dinner tomorrow. Come get me at seven. I’m taking you, but you’re driving.”

He smiled crookedly, one side more magnetic than the other. A smirk that loved you. “Sounds good to me.” He stepped closer and took my wrist. Thumb on my pulse, he pressed his lips to the nightingale on my hand. “I look forward to it, amado.”

_Oh, this is bad._

I waited until my heart was sure about the Keep Beating plan, then grabbed the back of Bas’s head and pulled him down so I could suck the smirk off his face. When I let him back up, he stared at me with unfocused eyes and reddened lips, panting.

Now it was my turn to smile. “Likewise, lovey.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been listening to a lot of 2009 Kelly Clarkson lately. This is really irrelevant to the story. Arthur disapproves on many levels :P

Standing outside of Mikkel’s house in summer sun, listening to birds chirping and kids playing down the street, I felt like I was in the middle of an advert for antidepressants. Or maybe cameras. Or orange juice. Regardless, I should have been more colorful and smiley to match. As it was, I stood out like a broken thumb. _As usual._

Alfred had dropped me off. He was headed this way for an eye appointment, to my embarrassing surprise. He’d looked at me weird when I asked him if he thought he needed glasses. _I’ve had contacts since junior high._ You’d think I would have known that, after him working for me for almost three years, and you would be making a lot of sense, but you’d also be wrong.

Mick’s car wasn’t in the driveway, but I could see Bjorn walking around the backyard, so I went round. He had hedges around the perimeter and little garden plots of flowers and succulents, and currently he was wearing those old-lady gardening gloves and doing something boring with a pair of clippers. Halfway across the battlefield, I called out, “Where’s Mick off to, then? Buying nappies for your newborn?”

Bjorn didn’t even look up from his pruning. Never before had a question been asked so flatly: “Is that really how you want to start this conversation?”

Now that I thought about it, it wasn’t really how I wanted to start the conversation, but I was digging my hole now; might as well keep going until I hit oil. “Did Mick tell you? You win, Bjorn. We’re not touring.”

He set down his clippers and stood up straight, leveling a weary gaze on me. “I’m sorry you’re disappointed about that, but I’m glad you’re not risking your health. Mental and physical.”

I felt the fury rising. “Don’t fucking patronize me. Your kids will think you’re a great parent once you brainwash them to be sensible, but my brain is too filthy to be washed. I see through your bullshit, plain as fucking day. Don’t say you’re sorry I’m disappointed. You’re not sorry. You’re glad I’m not living my life the way I want to because it gives you a fucking moral bellyache.”

Bjorn shook his head slowly, eyes sparking. “I have never met someone as self-centered as you. Really, Arthur? Really? You want to live your life the way you want—drugs, sex, all of it utterly meaningless—just because it was your idea in the first place. And you would never consider switching to a safer route, because—what? Would that be too much like your so-called evil parents? Mikkel told me why they kicked you out. Let me tell you, there are far worse fates than law school.”

There was a tiny part of my brain that knew Mikkel and Gilbert wouldn’t tell someone what my father had done to me without my permission.

But that tiny part was overwhelmed by the rest, which could only rage. _Rage._

I threw myself at him, and down we went, punching and rolling. He wasn’t terrible at fighting, unfortunately, but I could feel him holding back. I wanted to piss him off more, make him really tear into me, make me ugly. But I didn’t have time, because Mikkel’s voice shouted out, and then I was being yanked off of Bjorn and quite literally tossed across the yard.

I sat up, dazed, pain throbbing in my stomach and my face. Mikkel was stooping to help Bjorn to his feet. Bjorn had grass all over him and dirt smeared on his cheek and his hair was an absolute mess, but he said, “I’m alright.”

Still, Mikkel held him close for a second, and Bjorn closed his eyes, taking the comfort. The sight of the two of them anchored together made me feel so alone on this planet I thought I might spontaneously perish right there. Then Mick turned, arm around Bjorn, and demanded, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

I stood up, half-heartedly brushing grass off myself. “I . . .”

We all heard my voice crack. My fight had been beaten out of me. I tasted blood. Bjorn’s elbow had split my lip, probably by accident and that just made it hurt more. I knew I should say something, but I couldn’t think of a single word. I was a delinquent in the principal’s office with nothing to say in my own defense.

Bjorn’s voice was quiet. “This just proves what I’ve been saying all along, and you know it. Impulsive. Irresponsible, and disrespectful.”

Mikkel wasn’t quiet. “Do you care about anything besides yourself?”

But that was the thing, I’d never cared about myself. I said, “I care about the band. I care about Bas.”

Bjorn heaved a sigh. “That’s another thing. I don’t know how wise it is for you to be spending so much time with someone like him.”

 _Someone like him._ I stepped forward, even though I was declawed. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

He shook his head. “Of course you don’t even know. Have you bothered to find out anything about him, aside from what his chest looks like?”

There was a low blow, nearly enough to stagger me. “I’m so sorry I’m not like you, Bjorn. I don’t jump right into people’s demons when I first meet them. That’s called being polite, perhaps you’ve read about it in a magazine?”

Mikkel snorted. “Don’t stand in my yard and preach to us about being polite, Arthur. In fact, don’t stand in our yard, period. I think it’s a good idea for you to leave. Before I do something I’ll regret.”

And I saw the unwavering anger in my brother’s eyes, not a trace of remorse or guilt in there. Bjorn meant more to him, no matter what. Bjorn’s eyes looked no more compassionate. So I said, “Fine. I’ll fuck off out of your hair.”

I turned and walked off. Bjorn said something, but I couldn’t hear the words, and I sure as hell didn’t look back. I left the property, walked down the street, past the squealing children, past an old couple reading together on their front porch, past a dog prancing to and fro, completely jovial despite—or perhaps because of—the chain tying it to its home. I couldn’t take this, and I didn’t know if _this_ was the world or just me. They just didn’t fit together. Cube in circular hole. Does not compute.

I texted Alfred.

**Where are you?**

The response came a few minutes later.

**Sorry just got back in the car. Need a ride home?**

I ducked my head as a pair of teenage girls passed by, laughing about something of no consequence. They didn’t recognize me. If they did, would they have even cared?

**Yeah. I’m sorry.**

I needed to say it, even if I couldn’t bring myself to say it to the right person.

 

* * *

 

I couldn’t be by myself, so I found myself standing in Alfred’s place. In fact, I was standing in his kitchen, living room, and bedroom at the same time. He was hurriedly grabbing clothes off furniture and tossing them into the laundry hamper, mumbling sheepish apologies. I rotated slowly. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever even been in here. “This place is a lot smaller than I thought it was.”

Alfred shrugged, raising his hands and then letting them fall back against his hips with a smack. “Uh . . . It’s okay. I’m used to it now.” He glanced at me. “Can I, do you, are you thirsty? I have Coke.”

I must have taken too long to respond, because he leapt in: “Coca Cola! I mean. Pop. Not—”

“Yeah,” I said, to save him. “I’ll have a Coke. Thanks.”

He fetched me one from his cramped fridge, in which I spied a case of soda cans, a bottle of ketchup, and the largest package of hot dogs in America. “Is that what you eat? Hot dogs?”

Alfred blinked. “Oh. Uh. Well, I’m really good at making SpaghettiOs.”

I nodded. “I’m terrible at cooking. And buying groceries.”

Alfred groaned, flopping onto his bed and tipping his head back into the pillows. “No way, I’m the worst. There’s too much to pick from!”

I sat down at the foot of the bed, can in hand. “Do you know how many flavors of pudding they have now?”

Alfred threw up his hands. “I know! It’s crazy.”

Then we were in silence, sitting on his bed. It might have felt suggestive, or lonely for not being suggestive, but it was just—comfortable. I didn’t want it to be awkward for him, though, so I asked, “How did your plans go yesterday?”

“Oh, it was good.” Alfred smiled shyly, folding his arms behind his head. “It was, uh, a date.”

“Oh?” And then, even though it aged my soul a few years, I asked, “Pretty girl?”

Eagerly, like he’d been waiting his whole life to be asked that, Alfred replied, “Yeah, she’s beautiful. Really tall, too. Taller than me. She has, like, this Scandinavian kinda look? But she’s Russian. You know, really pale, light blonde hair. And her eyes are this blueish purpleish color? Oh, crap, that sounds like a bruise, doesn’t it? Never mind. They’re really nice, trust me.”

“I trust you.”

Then we were silent again. His legs were right there in front of me, and it would be easy to lie my own over his. I would have, if it were Gilbert. If it were Mikkel, back in the day. But he might think it was flirting. Or maybe he wasn’t a physically affectionate person. I wasn’t, either, or so I told people. I used to despise touching people. But after touring, letting any and all touch whatever part of me they wanted, I craved meaningful touches. Not even sexual ones. Just intimacy. Something that said _I care about you. You care about me. This means we’ll keep each other safe._

Not exactly punk thoughts, I know. But they did remind me of some good news.

“I have a date tonight,” I said.

Alfred smiled. “Really? Who with?”

“With Sebastião.”

“Oh cool, I didn’t know he was gay.” Panic widened Alfred’s eyes. “Or, wait, sorry—is he bi?”

“I dunno.” Another thing I didn’t know about Bas, damn it. “Tell me something. Had you met him, before he was here the other day?”

“No, but I knew of him. I’ve met his brother a few times. Through Gil. There’s always somebody who knows somebody, right? Small world.”

I nodded. “Small world. So you don’t know anything about Bas at all?”

His brow furrowed. “Uh . . . I mean, I know he’s from Spain and he plays guitar and sings.”

“And he doesn’t like Antonio,” I supplied.

Alfred nodded deeply, emphatic. “Oh yeah. He hates him.”

“Do you know why?”

“Not really. Something to do with Toni being more famous, I think. Marianne said he was the evil twin, but they’re not twins, as far as I know.”

I shook my head. “Not twins. Bas is sexier.”

Alfred laughed. He had a good laugh. Not as good as Bas’s, but good. “Everybody has a bro crush on Toni, though.” He saw the look on my face and added, “It’s like—”

I held up my gloved hand. “Don’t bother explaining. I’ll never understand straight people.”

His smile poked a dimple. “That’s okay, we’ll never understand you, either.”

“I’m glad we can come to this agreement,” I said, standing. “Now, come help me eat some pudding.”

He hopped up like the happy puppy he was. “Yes, sir!”

 

* * *

 

Bas’s car pulled into the driveway at seven on the dot. I’d barely closed the passenger door before he said, “You look good.”

“You look good, too.” He did, even if he was just wearing a pair of nice black pants and a dark red button-up and those bloody monk shoes. He didn’t need anything else. Actually, he didn’t need any of it, but it was illegal to be naked in public, so this would do.

He smiled faintly. “Is that a men’s jacket?”

I’d gone with black jeans, too—smaller and skinnier than his—and a flared leather jacket over this frilled gothic shirt. “Nope.”

He nodded, pulling away from the house. “You wear it better than a girl would.”

“I know.” But it was damn good to hear it from him.

“Give me your best GPS voice,” Bas said as he put on his signal light.

Posh and artificial, I said, “In five kilometres, bear left.”

“Mm, you do that a little too well.”

“I was a call girl in my past life.”

“You know, that almost makes too much sense.”

The restaurant was not too fancy but not too trashy. Middle road enough that it was affordable and we wouldn’t get kicked out for having tats and piercings. Our waitress led us to our reserved table, set down our menus, and informed us that the special was something about cheese but I wasn’t listening because Bas was looking at me and good God I wanted to put some of that bronze skin in my mouth.

When the waitress left, I said, “They have pisto here, I checked.”

“Great. Thanks.” He smirked. “But the real question is: Do they have stargazy pie?”

I laughed. “How the hell do you know what stargazy pie is?”

“I’ve seen it on TV.”

“You need to find some better TV shows, mate.”

Our waitress returned, dropping off water and a plate of three rolls. “Fight to the death over the third one,” I said, and Bas laughed but the waitress didn’t. She held up her little notepad. “Have we decided, gentlemen?”

Bas ordered the pisto and watched me with twinkling eyes while I ordered a tiny pizza for myself. As the waitress retreated with the menus, Bas asked, “Not hungry?”

“Nah, I had a late lunch.” _Bloody SpaghettiOs._

“Speaking of a fight to the death,” Bas said, “do you want to talk about your lip?”

“Eh. Not really.” I tore my roll in half. “I want to talk about you. Tell me about yourself.”

Sebastião raised an eyebrow. “I’m a Scorpio. My favorite color is blue.”

I buttered my roll, took a bite, and waved him on.

His gaze drifted. “I don’t know . . . I like pisto. Ah . . . I’m allergic to bees. Bee stings. And I broke my wrist when I was seven.”

I could feel the smile on my lips. “Doing what?”

“Being an idiot. How do you—I don’t know the English.” He raised his fists, slow-motion punching an invisible enemy.

“Fighting?”

He shook his head. “No.” A little frustrated press of the lips. “Mm. Play. Playing fighting.”

“Wrestling.”

He snapped his fingers. “Yes, yes. Wrestling. With my brother.”

I nodded. “You probably don’t want to talk about him.”

Resolute, he replied, “I don’t.”

“Fair enough. I have a question, though. Not about him. About Bjorn. You know him?”

Bas slowly turned the shiny black ring on his finger, round and round. “I know who he is but I can’t remember ever meeting him. He didn’t like parties. I remember the fans being upset that Mikkel got with someone so boring. I agreed with them.”

“Bless you.” I put a hand over my heart. “So if Bjorn was talking shit about you, it’s because he doesn’t know what he’s on about.”

Bas arched an eyebrow, much more serious now. “Depends what he was saying.”

I ignored the wee trickle of foreboding that let in, washed it down with a sip of sparkling water. “Bjorn doesn’t approve of our courtship.”

A weary sort of wisdom came into his face. “Probably because we’re similar people. He’d rather we dated people like him. He thinks we need perfect people to fix us until we’re perfect too. I know people who think like that. They want every crazy paired off with someone to save them.”

I realized I was practically climbing over the table and leaned back a bit. “You’re absolutely right. He could never handle the thought that we might not ever be one hundred percent okay. But I’m used to being zero percent so even fifty would be a great step-up to me.”

Bas nodded. “To me, too. Some days more than others.”

I slumped a little, relieved. “See, you understand. Why would we want to be with someone who doesn’t understand?”

He shrugged, looked down at his hands for a moment. I worried I’d overstepped, until he looked up again and asked, “Do I still have to talk about myself or can I ask you questions now?”

“Go right ahead.”

He set to work on a roll. “What’s your favorite song?”

_“Video Killed the Radio Star.”_

“Shut the fuck up,” Bas said, through our laughter.

“Come on. You can’t have a favorite song. That’s like having a favorite blood cell. A favorite breath of air.”

Bas tilted his head slightly. “So what’s your best song, then? That you wrote?”

I used my fork to poke at the ice cubes in my sparkling water. “Oh, I dunno. _Hunt_ , probably.”

It topped the charts for weeks and weeks back in the day. Now it was just used for movie trailers, men running and shooting and leaping off buildings while I sang about chasing someone down like a hound to the hind. The music video had featured several lively foxhounds, all of which had sworn loyalty to Gil and Mick and slobbered all over me multiple times by the end of the shoot. They gave us a good video in the end. Very cinematic. I couldn’t say anything about not working with children and animals, though, since rockstars were the worst mix of both.

“ _Hunt_ was good,” Bas said. “Not my favorite, though.”

I looked at him inquiringly, and he said, “ _The Sinkhole on Second Street._ ”

I almost dropped my fork on the floor. “Stop.”

“I’m serious.”

“I was so stoned I didn’t know who I was when I wrote that.”

“It’s great!”

“It’s quiet and it barely rhymes and the guitar isn’t even amplified and there’s barely any drums. It’s not even punk, except the not rhyming part. It’s just rock. Bad rock.” Bad rock—which some critics had called charming and some had called juvenile—about a sinkhole that got bigger and bigger and swallowed up the eccentric inhabitants of Second Street. That wasn’t really what people meant when they said _bring back old fbb_ , but at the same time, it was. It was unexpected. At one point, we’d been unexpected. Then we were just another emo boy band.

“It’s _great_ ,” Bas said. “It inspired a lot of my songs.”

I was actually shocked to feel my heart swell at that. It was a sensation I thought I’d developed a tolerance to years ago, but there it was, just as beautiful as it used to be. “Have I heard any of yours yet?”

“Just one. The lullaby.”

“It sounded wonderful,” I told him. “Honestly. People would love it, even in Spanish.”

Sebastião shook his head a little. “Not everything is for sale.”

I raised my glass. “Integrity. There’s something rare in the entertainment business. Cheers.”

Our food arrived, and the conversation stalled for the first few minutes. A certain thought was pressing on my mind, so I broke the silence: “I keep thinking about how you said my music helped you through a rough patch.” (Here I could see the same look that came into Bas’s eyes when I mentioned Antonio, so I knew not to ask about it. Not tonight, anyway.) “Lots of people have told me that, but I never know what to say. When someone you never knew existed walks up to you and thanks you for saving their life, what do you say? You’re welcome? Thank you? That was close, good thing I wrote the song?”

Bas swallowed and regarded me thoughtfully. “I think . . . If someone says you saved their life, tell them to enjoy it. Too many people think they need permission to be happy.”

I nodded, because I grew up in a family that felt guilty for going on holiday when they could have been working. I would not be like them. They weren’t happy. I would be. “Well, then,” I said. “Enjoy your life.”

Bas smiled, twining our fingers on top of the table. “Oh, I am.”

I smiled right back at him. “Me, too.”

 

* * *

 

When Bas dropped me off at home, he was the one who leaned over to kiss me, but I was the one who deepened it. It was when his hand drifted down to my collarbone that I pulled back to say, “You should stay here tonight.”

“Not after the second date.” Christ, his voice sounded fucking sexy when he was breathless.

“So we’re on second base,” I said. Strange, to go this slow. I hadn’t even counted bases with Marianne. We did little kisses, little touches, and then one night . . . Well, Gilbert’s couch knows.

“You’ve already fondled my tits,” Sebastião pointed out, amused.

I laughed. “Yeah, guess so. You wanna extend it to handies, then?”

He smirked. Oh, those lips. “Tempting, but—”

“You’re gonna make both of us jerk ourselves off in different houses? That’s just inefficient.”

His thumb smoothed small circles over my throat. “Your logic is very persuasive.”

 _You’re driving me mad, you are._ “Then why are we sitting here?”

He grasped my chin and leaned closer so I had no choice but to look into his lustful eyes. “Because if I get your clothes off right now there won’t be any moderation, amado.”

I stared at him for a _holy fuck_ moment. “You—ahem. You are a very strong-willed man.”

Our noses brushed as he kissed me, a soft and sweet one this time. “You’re too good to waste.”

_Jesus Christ._

“I should really, really get out of this car,” I murmured.

“Yes,” Bas said into my mouth, because we were kissing again.

“Okay, I’m going now,” I said, and kissed him again.

“Seriously,” Bas mumbled as I bit his lower lip.

“Yeah okay.” I pulled myself back before I lost my moderation on his car seat. I patted his shoulder and got out of the car. “Good night, lovey.”

I heard him laugh before I closed the door, and his muffled: “Good night, amado.”

He stayed there until I was safely inside. I closed the front door and leant back against it like a teenage girl just off the phone with her crush, except teenage girls didn’t generally have painfully tight zippers over throbbing issues they’d have to deal with in the shower.

My troubles felt far off now. Bjorn, Mikkel, Liz. No more touring. Recording our last album. Making a plan for the future. That was all muffled. I couldn’t care about it if I wanted to. All I could focus on was the taste of Bas on my lips and the prickly memory of his stubble on my chin. He was such a good drug.

Even with moderation, I knew I was addicted. And, though it wasn’t anything like a real concern right now, I couldn’t help but wonder:

_What would withdrawal be like?_


	10. Chapter 10

After lunch the next day (a gourmet meal of burnt toast), Gilbert came over so we could get some work done. I’d been pacing up and down the driveway, trying to think of something clever to rhyme with _honest_ , but when he arrived we went in to the recording room. I could tell before he even got here that we weren’t going to record anything, but at least we were there just in case we got something done by accident.

“Is Mikkel coming today?” I asked, without looking away from the whiteboard. I wrote _honest._ Then I wrote _Let me be honest. Let it be. Honesty/ly._ Then I dragged my fingertips down through the words so they became alien symbols.

“I don’t think so,” Gilbert replied, earnest enough that I knew he knew what had gone down at the Scandinavian residence. He didn’t comment about it, though, just rattled his cymbals and said, “He said he was buying paint for their nursery.”

I shook my head, just a little. Muscle memory. Trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible, I asked, “Are they going to get married?”

“Well, they’ve been together almost six years now.” Gilbert crossed to stand beside me, but I still didn’t look at him. “I dunno if they’ll get married, but they’ll probably always be together. They love each other.”

A pause. I couldn’t tell if it was sad in general or if that was just me.

“I’d like to get married,” Gil remarked, picking up the green pen and spinning it slowly between his fingers so the logo repeated, over and over and over again. I watched it, that dry-erase marker, go round and round. Maybe it would hypnotize me. Or maybe it would take me out of my trance and I’d wake up as me again, young and faulty and naive. I thought I was invincible, once. Back then, it never occured to me that all those stories I heard—ODing, self-harm, losing yourself once everyone wanted to know you and _thought_ they did—were things that happened to real people, like me. I’d always joked about it, right down to the name of the band, but God—it was so, so easy to be a failure.

“You’re that serious, then?” I still couldn’t bring myself to look directly at him. “About Matthew?”

He nodded. “He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Honestly, he is.”

_Don’t go there. Don’t. If Mick isn’t the best thing, you don’t need to be, either. Stop it. Stop being so fucking pathetic._

I rubbed my eyes. “What happened to us?”

“We grew up,” Gilbert replied, offhand but gentle.

I groaned, tipping my head back and covering my face with my hands.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” Gil said, in a tone that would’ve felt patronizing from anyone else. “Better to be grown up than washed up, ja?”

I sighed, letting my hands drop to my sides, and echoed in defeat, “Ja.”

We could’ve left it there. It would’ve been easier. Gil even started to turn back to his drums. But I had more I needed to say. My mouth wouldn’t obey me, seeking the path of least resistance. Fine, then. Rehab Lady’s words echoed, my first day, passing me an empty journal: _If it’s hard to talk, write out your feelings instead._ So I took the green marker out of Gil’s hands and wrote on the board:

**_I feel like you’re leaving me behind._ **

I didn’t look away from the words. No going back now.

Gil was still for a moment, reading or thinking. Then he picked up the red marker.

**_I would never leave you behind. But I don’t want to drag you kicking and screaming either._ **

I put down the green marker and picked up the black.

**_I just don’t know what I want._ **

**_So you thought you wanted what you had._ **

Marianne. I wanted her. But I also never wanted to see her again. Both of those extremes hurt; they were tearing each other apart inside me, and I didn’t know how much longer I would last in the crossfire. And touring. I wanted that, too. But I also didn’t want it. And, like Gilbert was implying, I knew I only wanted those things because they were what I’d had, before. They were what I knew. All of a sudden, I felt new. No, not new. Young. Twenty-six was a quarter of my allotted lifespan, but what had I done? I’d been all around the world, yet I’d seen none of it. I’d been in love only once, and now, with the heartbreak she’d left me with—what did love even feel like?

_Bas._

Arched eyebrows, warm green eyes, calloused bronze fingertips. Was that love? Lust, infatuation, yes. But love could come from those things easy enough. His laugh, his arms, his lips. I couldn’t tell if I was in love, but I knew for certain he was what I wanted.

Marianne had shot me down, but I’d handed her the gun. I was the one who cheated on her. I was the one who came home shaking with the shit I’d snorted before I left the last party of the tour. What had that trail of cocaine been on? Glass? Tits? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t even remember where the party had been, or how I’d gotten home. But it was three in the morning, and she was in bed. I vaguely, vaguely remembered crawling on top of her in the dark. Then she was waking up, furious, and why wouldn’t she be? Shouting at me. Throwing a curling iron at me. Telling me to _get out and don’t fucking come back until you’re sober!_ So, that’s what I did. But not before grabbing two bottles from the overflowing cabinet. Beer? Wine? Of course not. Whiskey and vodka.

 _Lucky you buckled your seat belt,_ the doctor told me.

 _Lucky you didn’t kill somebody,_ the policeman told me.

Over and over and over, my car flipped. For whatever reason, that was the part I remembered with crystal clarity. Stars, pavement, stars, pavement. Who knew drugs and stupidity were all it took to get a 1500-kilo machine airborne. And, even more of a miracle: all I had, physically, was the scar. Bodies were much better at healing than minds or souls or whatever this ruined thing inside me was.

 _Not ruined._ Not ruined? Ruined sounded permanent. But I could be fixed, right? Bjorn even said so. _Just keep cleaning up the mess. Sooner or later._ Sooner or later. I’d spent this long hating myself and Marianne for what happened between us, and hating myself and my brothers and Bjorn for the band coming to and end. Clearly, hatred was not a soothing balm. So . . .

I picked up my green marker again.

**_Maybe I need to let it go. New start. A real new start._ **

Gil drew a smiley face.

**_I think that’s a good plan._ **

That reminded me that I’d told Bjorn he’d be the first one to hear it if I ever made a plan. I still hadn’t made one. I hadn’t really planned on doing it, to be perfectly honest. But now that everything had happened, a plan sounded like a pretty good idea.

I finally looked at my brother and offered a fist, but Gil pulled me into a hug instead. “I’m proud of you.”

I smiled against his shoulder. Safety, that’s what this high was. Not even a high; it was too cozy to be a high. I didn’t want to _go go go._ In fact, I wanted to just _stay._ But I pulled back after I’d indulged for a few breaths. “You’re not my dad.”

Gilbert laughed. “Oh, that explains it.” I shoved his shoulder, and he stumbled back a whole inch, but only because he was distracted by his chiming phone. “It’s Mick. He got all his paint. He wants to know if we’re working today or not.”

All at once, I knew what I was going to do. Mikkel was a fresh wound, but he wasn’t as deep as Marianne. I’d see to him later. “Tell him to go back to IKEA,” I called behind me as I strode out of the room. “I have adult shit to do.”

I opened the hall closet, which was basically a black hole. Black leather jackets, black trench coats, black jumpers, black windbreakers. And, on the floor: black boots. Every square inch of the floor was occupied by boot. I went straight for my fuck-off boots, so called because they were knee-highs with three-inch heels and stitching all the way up like a corset from hell. I was already in eyeliner, but the shirt was nothing special; I threw a half-length leather jacket over it.

It wasn’t about not caring what you looked like, boys and girls. It was about _looking_ like you didn’t care what you looked like.

Gilbert had followed me, and he looked down in amusement while I finished lacing and buckling. “You need a ride?”

“Um.” I pulled the closet door shut. “Yes. Will you . . . ?”

Gil chuckled. “Of course, adult.” He gave me a nudge, but a gentle one so I wouldn’t topple head-over-three-inch-heels. “I told you I wouldn’t leave you behind.”

 

* * *

 

Antonio’s house was a beach house, which I felt was inappropriate because it was on a lake, which is absolutely not the same thing as a beach and no one could tell me otherwise. Half of it was on stilts and there was glass all over it. It wasn’t so modern that it looked sterile and unfinished, but I much preferred a place like Gilbert’s. Small, old, flawed. Who cared if there were cobwebs in the corners? A spider wouldn’t be caught dead in Antonio’s house. Spiders preferred places with character.

Unfortunately, Antonio answered the door. He brightened when he saw Gil, and he darkened when he saw me. “Oh. What a . . . pleasant surprise.”

“Wow,” I said. “Now I see why the fangirls call you charming. That disgusted pause was really illuminating.”

Antonio grimaced at me. “Sebastião isn’t here.”

The only good thing about Antonio: Bas’s name sounded sexy on his lips. But that still meant I thought something about Antonio was sexy, so I’d have to eat a bar of soap or blind myself or something when I got home.

“I’m not here for him,” I replied, tipping my chin up a bit. I was almost taller than him, with my fuck-off boots. “I’m here to talk to Marianne. Is she home?”

He stared at me just a moment too long. “Yeah. She is.” He half-turned, leaning back to shout into the house, “Mari! El diablo está aquí!”

“Je suis en haut!” she called.

Antonio turned to me. “She said—”

“I know what she said. I did date her, if you recall.” I pushed past him, but glanced back. “And even if I hadn’t, Christ. Diablo? Really? What do you think they teach in English schools?”

He looked genuinely surprised. “I didn’t realize you went to school.”

I couldn’t decide if I was more pissed at his words or the fact that I was pretty sure he was telling the truth, so I said tightly, “Gilbert,” and Gil quickly said, “Show me your new ride, Toni,” and off they went to appreciate steel and rubber and paint. I went in the opposite direction, up a set of clear glass stairs—clinging to the railing the whole bloody time—and through the only open door I could see. The smell of paint hit me in the face, but not the rather pleasant scent of house paint. Acrylic paint. Art class paint. I’d failed art class, back in the day, but it wasn’t my fault the bloody teacher wouldn’t accept music as a genre of art.

Sunlight came in through huge east-facing bay windows, landing on several canvases laden with fiery red, orange, yellow flowers; I could only imagine what they looked like when the sun was rising. Every wall had canvases leaning against it or hung up on it. Few were totally full. Mostly they were swirling blooms of flowers or elegant horses or bright-winged butterflies. A couple caught my eye in particular, though. A canvas I’d have trouble getting my arms around, a close-up view of pale hands clasped lovingly with bronze ones, ring finger endowed with a jewel that she’d captured quite impressively. The other canvas my eyes kept going back to was a small one, the size of a book, leant in the corner. It looked almost totally black, at first. You had to really look at it to see the vague shapes of a face, the muted green of the eyes.

_Antonio has green eyes. It’s probably just him._

“This is a pleasant surprise, Arthur.”

I turned. Marianne was watching me with a small but friendly smile on her lips. God, she was so pretty. Her smock was just an oversize T-shirt spattered with pain, and her tiny bun— _chignon_ , she corrected me in a mumble, clips between her lips—was messy, and I felt it in my chest how much I wanted her. _No. We’ve been over this._ She was beautiful like a painting. You could gaze longingly at a painting and be hurt by its beauty all day long, but you could never have it. _That’s why it hurts._

“Funny,” I said. “That’s what Antonio said.”

“But I mean it,” she said, amused.

I almost smiled. “I didn’t realize you were a painter.”

She shrugged, just bashful enough to be tolerable. “I took a course on it, and I enjoyed it. The teacher said I had talent, so I’ve been trying to—hone it, I guess.” She glanced around the studio. “Practise makes perfect. And it fills the day. Almost like a job, right?”

She’d never worked, when we were together. She hadn’t needed to, though she might as well have, since I was gone so much. She wasn’t like Bjorn, who had made it very clear he wasn’t going to sit around with Mikkel’s credit cards all day. She’d been good friends with my credit cards, actually. Not that I’d told her to be stingy. More like: _Whatever you want, darling. It’s yours._ Except a good boyfriend, apparently.

“So.” She swirled her brush around in a cup of murky water like someone stirring a spoon into coffee. “What did you come here for?”

“To talk to you,” I replied. “About us.”

She stiffened, gaze sliding to me in a guarded way. “We aren’t us anymore, Arthur. We won’t be us again. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

 _Thanks for reminding me._ “No, not like that. Us, like. Us being friends. Or not enemies, at least.”

“Oh.” She relaxed immediately. “Well, sure. I’d like to be friends with you. I miss talking to you, you know.” She quirked an eyebrow, just a little. “When you’re sober.”

“I miss talking to you, too.” I raised both eyebrows at her. “When you’re not throwing electrical appliances at my head.”

“To be fair, I only threw something once,” she said, hand on her hip. It was almost instantaneous: my brain saw the line of her waist revealed under the big shirt and said _yesyesyes_ and then the ring on her finger and said _nonoabsolutelynot_. But that was progress. “You probably slurred a good thirty percent of the conversations we had.”

“Well, I don’t know if it was that many. I wasn’t a high-functioning alcoholic.”

“No? I’d say you were pretty high-functioning. Medium-functioning, at least.”

“Alright, settle down,” I said, shaking my head and stifling a smile while she laughed. “Bloody cheek.”

“A little bird told me that you and Sebastião are _involved_ ,” Marianne said, like a gossiping housewife, which I guess she pretty much was.

“Was the little bird sexy and Spanish?”

“You could be describing two men in this house.”

“I said _sexy._ ”

“Hey.” She pursed her lips, frowning playfully. “Yes, it was Sebastião who told me. He just told me that you two had a date one day, because I asked where he was headed looking so nice.” She gave me a sidelong look. “Do you like him?”

“Yes,” I told her, full-on, direct. “Very much.”

She studied me, then nodded slowly. “I can see that you do. But I don’t know if—”

I held up a hand. “Are you about to say you don’t know if we’re good for each other? Because I’ve heard that and thought about that enough already. Long story short, I highly doubt there’s somebody out there who’s perfect for someone like me. Bas is probably as close as I’ll get.” I recalled Alfred’s claim that Marianne had said Bas was the evil twin. “I know you’re biased toward Antonio, but you can admit that Bas isn’t a bad person.”

“No, he isn’t a bad person,” she admitted. “But . . .” She shook her head a little, conflicted expression clearing. “You know what? It’s not my place to criticize you. I’m glad you found someone you like, Arthur.”

“I’m glad, too.” I stepped closer to her. The final stage of this part of the plan. “Now that we’re friends, I want to ask a favor of you.”

Because she knew me, she crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not agreeing to anything until you tell me what it is.”

 _Deep breath, don’t be creepy._ “I want to kiss you.”

Her face twisted, offended. “No!”

I held up my hands. “Just a tiny one! Not even with tongue!”

“No! I told you, there’s no more us. Do you think you’re going to trick me? Seduce me, or something? You’re wearing eyeliner, for God’s sake—”

“You thought it was hot when we were together,” I told her, briefly blindsided.

“I didn’t want to upset you,” she said. “Your ego was even more fragile back then.”

I’d think about that all night, but right now I had a mission. I put my hands together to beg. “Just one kiss. I don’t want to trick you or seduce you. I just want to have one last kiss with you. We never got to, you know? I was in the hospital, and I . . . well, I know you came to visit me, but I wasn’t awake.” I stepped closer to her, so there were only a few inches between us, and let my voice dip lower. “This can be the official end of our relationship. I know it’s been over for a year, but I don’t want it to end the way it did. Let’s extend it to right now so we can end on a good note. Our last kiss.”

She narrowed her eyes, searching my face for wicked intentions. Warily, she echoed, “Our last kiss.”

I cupped her face with my gloved hand—but my bare fingers still recognized the soft curve of her cheek—and when she didn’t pull away, I leaned in and kissed her. It was a gentle, chaste kiss, our lips parted just a little—and I felt absolutely nothing. I intensified it, tilting my head, sucking on her lower lip. That had her making a sound of protest and moving her head back, but that was fine because my experiment had proven successful: I wasn’t in love with her anymore. I didn’t even like kissing her anymore; it felt meaningless, because it mostly was, and whatever gloss she was wearing tasted disgusting.  _Just like that. Our last kiss._  I was free of the burden of her; the wound was scarred over. No more hurting, no more lovesickness. Now I could go after what I really wanted—

“Antonio wants to know if you still have his screwdriver.”

I looked toward the door. Bas stood in the doorway, the comfort and the shock of him. I realized I’d never seen him in just socks before; one was black and one was white. But he wasn’t paying attention to my choice of footwear. He was looking at me, standing inches away from Marianne, my hand on her face, her lip gloss in shiny smudges on my mouth. _No._ Yes. _This isn’t about to happen to me._

Every time I thought something couldn’t happen to me, it did. Right in my fucking face.

Sebastião’s face darkened, just like his brother’s had when he saw me, but then even darker. Worse than disgust. Betrayal. I wanted him to say something, to distract me from how terrible his gaze was, but as the silence stretched, I felt grateful for it. His words would be ten times worse. And they were.

Slow and quiet and terrible, he asked, “Do you know why I’m here?”

I lowered my hands to my sides, unable to move when his gaze was holding me at gunpoint. Maybe Marianne felt the same way; she wasn’t moving, either.

“Because . . .” My voice was so small even I could barely hear it. “For the . . . the screwdriver?”

His eyes narrowed. “Keep your mouth shut, Arthur.”

There was no arguing with that.

“I’m here, staying with my brother for the first time in _months,_ because I wanted to repave the broken roads between us,” Bas told me. He was having a hard time keeping his voice—his beautiful, husky voice—even, and every little quaver or wobble was a blade in my heart. “You were trying to be better, so I wanted to try and be better, too. I wanted to stop feeling so broken.”

That almost knocked me down. I’d inspired him in more ways than one. He was shaping his comeback after mine? His tour of self-repair and purifying of bad blood was because of me? Me, the fuck-up who had just gotten caught in a scene straight out of a bad soap opera, the fuck-up who had attacked someone in their backyard yesterday. My fans had always deserved better than me, but this was too much.

“I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with something like this again,” Bas said, shaking his head. “I didn’t think I’d get my hopes up enough for them to be let down. I thought . . .” He shook his head again, more serious this time. “But I see how it is. She’s the drug, and you’re always going to relapse. I was just a fucking distraction.”

He turned and stormed out of sight.

_No. No. No. This cannot be happening to me. No._

Marianne touched my arm, gentle and nervous. “Arthur—”

It was instant.

I shoved her away from me.

She staggered into the little table next to her easel. I grabbed for her, but she jerked away—and over went the table, paints and water spilling all over her and the floor. Orange splattered onto my fuck-off boots in time with a door slamming downstairs. Not even close to the punishment I needed. She looked up at me from the floor, and it was exactly the face she’d shown me before we broke up: anger, betrayal, regret, and the worst of all: fear.

_I am a monster._

“I—I’m sorry,” I said, but I couldn’t stay and help her, and I was ninety percent sure from the look on her face that she didn’t want my help, anyway. I couldn’t let Bas leave. If he left, I would have to go back home and think about this, and worry about this, and he might not answer me if I tried to call him, and then I would be alone in my head with _this_ all night, and it was too fucking stupid to let him do this to us.

So I ran out of the studio, down the hall, almost fell down those damned glass stairs in my damned fuck-off boots. I didn’t have time to debate if the door slamming had been the front door or not, because just then I heard the roar of a motorcycle starting up outside. I burst through the door and ran around to the open garage. There was Bas’s car, parked beside Marianne’s and Antonio’s. There were Antonio and Gilbert, watching in alarm. And there was Bas, about to drive off.

I ran out in front of him, grabbing the handlebars when he almost ran me over. I heard him cursing in Spanish, muffled by his helmet. “Please,” I begged. “Please don’t leave. Please. I can explain, just please for the love of God don’t leave.”

I couldn’t see his face through the tinted visor. I needed to pace. The waiting, always the waiting.

Sebastião lifted a leg, but it wasn’t to take off and flatten me to the pavement. He lowered the kickstand, let the bike lean, and swung off. Ignoring Gil and Antonio, he went into the garage and returned with a helmet for me. It was too big, and I’d actually never been on a motorcycle before, but I sure as hell wasn’t complaining. I climbed on behind him—there was absolutely nothing to hold on to, so this was probably illegal—and let him tug my arms forward until they were wrapped around him. Then he was kicking up the kickstand and we were tearing away. I turned as much as I dared to look behind us. Gilbert and Antonio and Marianne were all standing there, watching me go. They were still problems to solve—I’d gone two steps forward and one step back with Marianne—but they were later problems. Right now, this was my priority.

 _He’s most important to me,_ I realized suddenly. _He’s my Bjorn. My Matthew._

I let my clunky-helmeted head rest against Bas’s back and held on to him, tight.

 

* * *

 

I didn’t expect us to go to Michelle’s café or anywhere urban at all really, and we didn’t. Bas carved a swift, noisy path—I couldn’t tell if he was speeding or not but it certainly felt like it—away from all things suburbia. But when he reached the point where we’d turn onto the highway, he went right instead of left. I’d never once been on this road, and when the speed limit stayed well below highway speed, I realized why. This was a winding, rural route, the way tourists went when they wanted to see scenic things on their drive rather than the monotony of the highway. Trees and fields and, after a while, a big red barn and a pasture full of cows. What was all this doing out here? Not that I’d been missing it; the Arthur Kirkland Show did not include an episode where I learned to appreciate the simple life and made food from whatever I could get out of a cow. No. Just, no. But driving out here was at least a way to slow down. I didn’t need to be terrified of what might happen if I screwed up my next conversation with Bas, or if I couldn’t find anything to do with myself now that the world was done with me. All of this sky and grass out here said a lot of things to me—hay fever being one of them—but the biggest of all was: life goes on. The world would keep turning, whether I had anything to do on it or not. It had pissed Bjorn off, but there was something to my old philosophy: _If it’s all gonna go to shit, why bother?_ In reality, I thought now, it went both ways. If we were all going to die anyway, we had no reason to care—but we had no reason to be assholes, either. _If we’re all going to die, we might as well make the most of it._

Jesus, that almost sounded like a healthy thought.

Bas stopped the bike next to a bridge that ran surprisingly high over a slow-moving river. Just a short bridge, a blink-and-miss-it bridge. But a nice bridge to stroll across, probably, with an American or a dog or some other cheerful creature, and breathe clean air and watch the water flow. That’s what we did, once I could convince my arms to let go of Bas and my legs to remove my body from the motorcycle. He took off his helmet and turned away before I could see his face; I followed him onto the bridge and mirrored him, leaning my elbows on the railing and peering down over the edge.

“The last time I was here,” Bas said, with a dark note to his voice that made a not-nice shiver climb the small of my back, “it was winter.”

It wasn’t hard for me, of all people, to figure out what he meant by that. I tried to gauge the height of this bridge. High, yes, but high enough? That was always the question, when you were broken, when you were constantly needing more to fill the impossible hole inside you. High enough? Strong enough? Hot enough? Desperate enough?  _Winter._ A slow river like this, there would be at least an inch of ice, right? Maybe two. Maybe three. Thick enough, though, if you knew what you were doing. If you really wanted to destroy yourself.

Bas looked out across the pleasant summer afternoon, an afternoon for breezes and beaches and butterflies. He wasn’t seeing any of it; he was looking within, gaze vague in the middle distance. “You rely on other people to keep you sane, don’t you?”

I wanted to disagree, but of course he knew. I nodded.

He sighed, very softly. Surrendering to an old defeat. “I relied on Antonio. He was the big brother, you know? He always stood up for me when we were kids. When we decided we wanted to come to America, try to be singers, we made a deal. We promised that we wouldn’t go on without each other.”

I thought of my brothers, always behind me, at my side, even in front of me—wherever I needed them, they were there. Even with all this bullshit I’d brought to the table, I knew if I _needed_ Mikkel—he would come for me. _No man left behind._

“He got offered a label,” Bas said, voice dropping low, bitter. “They told him he had an album, _if_ he didn’t sing with me. They actually said that to us, to my face. I was in the room.”

I couldn’t even be surprised. They’d said the same thing to me, when we signed our first contract. _Gil and Mick can do backup,_ I’d said, and the exec had looked at me, lips still smiling but eyes very, very serious. _Let’s let ’em stick to their instruments, okay, slick?_ They were there, too. They weren’t heartbroken—neither wanted to be singers—but looking back on it, I felt slimy for being spoken to like I was the only one who mattered. Of course, at the time, I was overjoyed; I was an adult; I was important. Nine times out of ten, if we did an interview together, the interviewer spoke exclusively to me, which was my third favorite excuse to not do interviews these days. But— _This isn’t about you._

“That’s fucking bullshit,” I said. “Your voice is ten times better than Antonio’s.”

Bas shook his head at me, because he knew: “It doesn’t matter how good your voice is. Your style matters. The words you sing and the way you sing them matters. Who you are matters. Antonio is the charming good boy. He’s what the mainstream world wants.”

It was true; I’d known it as soon as I heard Antonio’s first single. He had a perfectly _fine_ voice, clean notes, almost too clean. He sang like he loved every preteen girl in Western society, and every preteen girl in Western society sure as hell loved him for it. He would never dream of screaming _SING ALONG MOTHERFUCKERS_ at a concert. And he was just Latino-flavored enough to be sexy and exotic to make people feel good about diversity in music without diverging too far from their cultural comfort zone. Antonio was perfect. Sebastião was _real._

“He didn’t even talk to me about it,” Bas said, looking sullenly down at his gloved hands on the railing. “He just signed it, right there, and they asked me to leave the room while they discussed it. Oh, he apologized, afterward. He said he was _Sorry things turned out like this._ Like they happened without anything to do with him. Like he didn’t just decide to fucking—” His voice was becoming more shake than voice, so he stopped, regrouped, started again. “And now he’s recording an album, without me.” He shrugged, a small tight one that showed how much of a lie his nonchalance was. “I guess we wouldn’t have worked singing together, anyway. He likes bright, happy songs. I like honest songs.”

I nodded as emphatically as I could. “Yes. Honest. Yes. Have you written any? No, you have, you told me. Didn’t you?”

He glanced at me. “Some. They’re online, but you can’t get discovered online anymore. It’s oversaturated.”

I wasn’t sure if he’d been told that or if he’d simply assumed it based on poor results, and I really didn’t know anything about starting off in the current market, but I did know two things for certain: he would never be a household name, but there was a sizable niche that would welcome him with open arms and no amount of oversaturation would prevent that. It was just a matter of getting over that first hurdle, of figuring out how to get him Out There. If only I could—

Wait.

I could.

“How would you like some promotion?” I asked.

He snorted. “What, a plug at the end of track six? Your label won’t like that.”

“I’m not working with a label. I’m self-publishing. And I’m going to do one last show.” I smiled at him, something I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do again fifteen minutes ago. “And you’re going to open for us.”

He stared at me, startled. He thought I was joking, I could tell, and then the fear came. “But I don’t—I haven’t—”

I framed his face in my hands. “Relax. If you want to be heard by millions of people, you have to play for them. You don’t have anything to worry about. These are people that like _my_ music, for crying out loud. They’ll love you.”

I felt the ease come over him, the way his face rested more calmly in my palms. His eyes searched my face, and I saw that sparkle coming back into them. “Do you?”

I thought about him saving me at the party, flirting with me in the pool, singing me to sleep on the phone. Thinking I was beautiful without the trashy glamour of rock bottom. Trusting me enough to show me this intimate place where he nearly gave in to the horrible lows of life. Then I remembered I was supposed to explain what had happened at the house, so I said, “I’m sorry about what happened with Marianne, I just wanted to see if I actually loved her, and I don’t, I don’t even want her, I just thought I did because I was internalizing things and wishing I could go back to the way things were even though things are honestly so much better now, especially because of you. You’re a much better kisser, first of all—”

“Arthur.” Bas smiled with that wonderful fond exasperation that only came from the best people in your life. “You didn’t answer my question.”

I had to scramble back through my thoughts to remember what he’d asked. “Oh! God. Yeah.”

Now he arched one of those seductive eyebrows, cupping my face. “Do you love me, amado?”

The most shocking thing here was that I wasn’t blushing, and the phrase that was once buried beneath all that stupid stoic bullshit now offered itself easily, and I wondered if this was what growing up felt like. “I love you.”

With that, he _lifted me up_ off my goddamn feet which drew from me the squeak of a five-year-old girl, and Bas grinned and _now_ I was blushing, damn it all. “Fuck you, sexy bastard,” I told him, and he kissed me before anything else could come out of my mouth. We kissed and kissed and sucked on tongues and bit lips and I clung to him so I wouldn’t fall off the railing and he ground against me just enough to drive me crazy and it was a good thing nobody ever used this road to slow down and enjoy life because they would also have had to enjoy me dropping to my knees— _wait, we could get arrested, you don’t have to do this_ —and tugging down Bas’s trousers— _I know, I want to, tell me to stop_ —and my mouth on him, sloppy and imperfect— _no, I want it too, fuck_ —because I was very out of practise with this, but something was better than nothing and I no longer needed everything all at once. It was no longer the urgent demand of _Enough?_ It was the satisfying, content knowledge of _Yes, enough._

Afterward, when he pulled me to my feet, I smirked at him. “Worth the risk of public indecency?”

He was still out of breath, which I felt quite proud about considering I’d been the one with obstructed airways. “Yes. I’m definitely the number-one fan of your mouth—”

“Cheers.”

“—but I think I should show you what mine can do, too, no?”

“Tempting as it is, I’m gonna decline for now. Two in a row seems like tempting fate, to be honest. Plus, I owed you. This was a good way to make all that up to you, right?”

His brow furrowed. “Well . . . that doesn’t seem very, you know, healthy—”

“Oh, I know, it isn’t healthy. I’m just kidding. Mostly.” I nudged his shoulder with my own. “So serious. You’re sounding Norwegian.” Seeing the look on his face, I stroked his cheek until he smiled. “Don’t worry. I know sex isn’t about owing anything and I know relationships need to be healthy. I’m just being a twat because I’m very happy but I don’t know how to say that. I also don’t know how to keep a relationship healthy, but I’ll try my best.”

“So will I,” he said, taking my hand off his face so he could kiss the back of it. “We’ll learn from our mistakes.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I replied. “Shall we return to real life now? I don’t really want to, let’s be clear, but I’m an adult now so I have to keep up appearances.”

“I’ll take you home,” Bas agreed. “I’ll see how Marianne’s feeling. She’s probably had enough of you for one day.”

I couldn’t be offended by that, because he was right. Despite the voiced plans to vacate the premises, neither of us moved. Bas was still standing there, looking at me with sparkling eyes, holding my hand. I raised an eyebrow at him.

“Thank you, amado,” he said. God, I’d never get sick of his voice.

“For what?” I asked, assuming he meant the obvious.

But his smile was even softer than his voice. “For not letting me leave you.”


	11. Chapter 11

I didn’t want to badger Alfred for a ride, so I took a cab to Gilbert’s place the next day, but I didn’t see any albino Germans when I arrived. The door was unlocked, but the POS wasn’t in the garage. I shifted my guitar case from one hand to the other as I stepped back into the kitchen, and a note on the counter caught my eye. I walked round, head tilted to read Gilbert’s blocky handwriting. _Gone to get snacks. Love you._ Probably not for me, but I still appreciated the sentiment. Matthew must be here, then, and probably napping if there was need for a note like that. I considered my options: sit around and wait for Gil to return and chance Matthew waking up and finding me and being creeped out that someone he’d never met was hanging around while he slept, or wake him up and finally meet this elusive boyfriend of Gil’s.

I called, “Anybody home?” and then added, “It’s Arthur,” in case he thought I was a burglar.

No response came, so I started peeking into rooms. Empty living room, empty dining room, empty bathroom. I was just starting up the stairs when I heard a tiny whimper. I didn’t recognize it at first; it was barely a second’s worth of sound, there and gone so fast I thought I might have imagined it. But then there was a soft sniffling sound, and I realize this was someone trying not to cry.

I went straight for the bedroom, and sure enough there was Matthew on the floor beside the bed, knees hugged to his chest, weeping into the sleeves of his sweater. I stood in the doorway, watching him struggle to breathe; shaky inhales, shaky exhales, stifled sobs and whimpers. In the time it took me to get through a normal breath, his breathing worsened so noticeably I knew this was either an anxiety or asthma attack, and with Gilbert gone unexpectedly, I highly suspected the formet.

I had no idea what the best thing to do was, but I knew better than to leave him alone. So I approached slowly, saying as softly as I could, “Breathe, just breathe, don’t worry about anything, it’s okay.”

Matthew looked up at me. He already knew I was here, so he didn’t jump. I didn’t think he could be startled right now, anyway. The sight of me had him turning even redder and erupting with tears. Now he was actually _gasping._

_Oh, God, if Gil comes home and thinks I killed his boyfriend . . ._

I didn’t know what else to do, so I did what would make me feel better if I was freaking out. I took Black Beauty out of the case, knelt in front of Matthew, and strummed. Slightly out of tune, but this wasn’t the time for perfection. Just healing. _Am I really about to do this?_ I was. There was no way this was going to be right to the note, playing by ear and by memory, but I picked out the opening of _Fearless_ by Taylor bloody Swift.

Matthew perked up, staring at me with violet eyes made even more beautiful by the red of his sclera. I smiled lightly, thinking, _Thank God no one will ever hear me do this._ Then, with those frightened eyes searching my face, I realized what that actually meant. I was glad no one would see me comforting someone? Trying to help someone? Why? Because it didn’t go with my image? Because it was an alternative country pop song? _Who fucking cares?_

I let all of that go. And I sang the song.

_There’s something ’bout the way_

_The street looks when it’s just rained_

Matthew dried his face on his poofy sleeves—he was wearing one of Gilbert’s sweaters—and calmed down as I sang the first verse, and he actually smiled when I mumbled through the words I didn’t know. But the chorus saved me, and Matthew came with me, mouthing the words.

_Headfirst, fearless!_

Fearless. That was what Gil made Matt, and that was what Bas gave me, too: safety, more understanding of the things both of us feared. And that’s what all Bjorn’s sensibility and stability gave Mikkel. Living on the edge was exhilarating, but it was also exhausting, dangerous. It was time to retire from hurting ourselves, once and for all.

I could barely remember the second verse of the song, but Matthew had come down from his terror so I just sang the chorus again and strummed lower until we were quiet. I offered my non-gloved hand. “Sorry for intruding,” I said. “I hope I didn’t make that worse.”

Matthew hesitated, then reached out to shake my hand. He didn’t try to hide the white scars on his pale wrist, and I didn’t let my expression change when I saw them. Most of the fans I met, at concerts or in hotel rooms, had scars somewhere. It was just a fact of life, really. Sometimes the hurt inside overflowed into hurt outside. Not even Mikkel and Gilbert were safe from it. We all had our scars.

“Matthew Jones,” he said, in a tiny voice, nasal from his stuffy nose. “Thank you. For singing to me. It made me feel better.”

“Arthur Kirkland.” I shook his hand, smiling. “My pleasure.”

Downstairs, the door opened and shut, and Gil’s voice rang out: “I’m home, liebling!”

Matthew brightened so much at the sound of his voice I had to distract myself from the puppy love before I started cooing. _First Taylor Swift, now this. I’m turning into a twelve-year-old girl._ I put my guitar back into the case, calling, “We’re up here, mate.”

Gil appeared in the doorway, looking between us both with a hesitant smile battling the concern in his eyes. “Everything okay?”

I stood, offering Matthew a hand. He took it and nodded as I pulled him up, those eyes lingering on me. “Yes,” he replied, with more surety in his voice than before. “We’re okay now.”

 

* * *

 

I joined them both in the kitchen for some snacks—which turned out to be four different kinds of crisps and two different kinds of dip—and mostly just listened while Matthew and Gilbert talked. Mikkel and Bjorn talked like they were constantly solving a problem: two detectives on a crime show, throwing evidence at each other until they finished each other’s sentences and came up with the solution. But Gil and Matthew were both gentle with each other, constantly offering reassurance. _I got both kinds because I couldn’t remember which you liked best. Oh, thank you. I threw out the last of those cookies because they were stale. Oh, I forgot about those, thanks._ It was just—comfortable, listening to the back and forth. Nobody was under any pressure, nobody had to fear getting in trouble or pissing the other off. I highly doubted they would ever, ever get into an argument. I didn’t even think arguing with Matthew was possible. Like kicking a flower. You could do it, by why the hell would you?

Eventually the conversation lulled and I was about to say something about getting the show on the road, but before I could Gil asked, “Did you show Art your pictures?”

Matthew immediately looked nervous. “No . . .”

“You don’t have to,” Gilbert said, just as immediate as the nerves.

Matthew crunched one last crisp, took a deep breath, and nodded. I kept waiting for him to stop looking like a shy puppy, but he hadn’t yet. How did you make out with somebody so innocent-looking? “Okay. Come see.”

He led us down into the basement, somewhere I’d never been. It was typical basement stuff to one side, furnace and dusty storage stuff. But the other side was its own little room—a dark room, as it turned out, complete with pools of chemicals for developing photos and glossy squares hanging above to dry. The walls reminded me of Marianne’s studio, but _more_ —framed photographs everywhere, most of them at jaunty angles. Seeing Marianne’s art wasn’t like this; I already knew all the color she had inside her. But seeing this, all these delicate shots of humming birds sucking nectar from flowers and maple leaves floating on puddles, it felt backward. It was seeing what was inside someone before really getting to know them. _No wonder he was reluctant,_ I thought. Then it hit me: _This is what I do with every album. None of them know me, but they know what my soul sounds like._ What an invasive icebreaker art was.

“These are lovely, Matthew,” I said, and was pleased to hear that I sounded genuine, because I did actually mean what I was saying. “I had no idea all our friends were artists.”

Gilbert snaked an arm around Matthew’s waist. “Great minds think alike,” he said, nuzzling Matthew’s temple.

I watched them standing there, snuggling with their eyes closed and smiles on their mouths, and then I looked at the pictures on the wall again. The chocolate eyes of one of Ludwig’s dogs, the nose in crisp foreground detail and the fluffy ears soft in the background. A horizon of black trees against a twilight sky. Gilbert and Mikkel, standing side-by-side, Mick’s arm around Gil’s shoulder, both of them doubled over with laughter, big grins bright with the lighting Matthew had chosen for the photo. That photo was probably taken when I was in rehab, and even though rehab was one of the best things I’d done, I still wished I could have been there for the picture, happy with my brothers. _I’ll be in the next one. I’ll . . ._ An idea bloomed in my head.

I turned to Matthew. “Tell me something. Would you be willing to take some pictures for me?”

Matthew’s eyes flashed open. He stood up straight, alert. “Um, uh . . . What for?”

“For my new album. I think you could give us a great cover. Maybe some posters, too.”

Matthew looked even more intimidated than before he invited me to see his work. “I . . . I don’t know . . .”

I took over the Gil role. “It’s alright if you don’t want to,” I told him, with something better than gentleness: respect. “But I think you’d kill it.”

He nibbled his bottom lip. I knew what that was like: knowing you would never be able to do this thing, even though you wanted to do it, unless you swallowed your fear and forced yourself. That skinny British kid would never have approached two guys—both taller, older, and foreign—and asked, _Did I hear you say you’re looking for a singer?_

“Well . . .” Matthew’s uncertainty stretched out the word. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “I trust your eye.”

Matthew glanced at Gil, who smiled reassuringly. “It’ll be your first commission. What do you say?”

Slowly but surely, a smile brightened his face, and those violet eyes warmed us both. “Okay. I’ll try my best. Thank you.”

“Thank _you_ ,” I said, then clapped Gilbert on the shoulder. “Come. We have Vikings to conquer.”

 

* * *

 

“Do you have a plan?” Gil asked as we drove to Mick’s place. “Of what you’re going to say?”

“Oh, I have a full script,” I told him.

He laughed. “Really, I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

He glanced at me, then back to the road, impressed. “I’m glad. I don’t want any fighting today. It was bad enough when you fought Bjorn. I really don’t feel like getting between you and Mick.”

“You could take him,” I said, poking at his bicep. “We definitely could together. You hold him down and I’ll hit him. Tag-team.”

“Oh yeah,” Gil agreed, nodding. “Forget about the script. That sounds like a much better plan.”

“It’s definitely Plan B.”

Thinking about all these things—fighting, Mikkel, scars—had me remembering one night in the early days of the band, one of our first gigs at a pub. I was still fifteen, and puberty was confirming something I already knew about myself, but something I had so far done a good job of ignoring. I thought I was so stealthy, always the quick glance/look away that I thought Mick and Gil never noticed when they came out of the bathroom with towels hung messily around their hips (they absolutely did). I thought they wouldn’t notice it in the men’s bathroom either, but they did. It was in the pub men’s room, some guy twice my age who was very drunk but still handsome enough that my eyes kept going to him. _What are you staring at, faggot?_ I’d looked at myself in the mirror, just an ugly kid. Before the band, I would have just ignored it. But now I was a punk. I couldn’t let somebody talk shit about me. So the stupid kid turned around, saying, _Who are you calling a faggot?_ The guy stepped up to me, half a head taller, and pushed me back into the sink. _You, faggot. What’re you gonna do about it? Suck me off in self-defense?_ Stupid, stupid. I’d shoved the guy back, but he barely noticed. The guy snorted. _Wow. I’m scared now, pretty boy._ He probably would’ve left if I’d apologized right there. But I hadn’t. I’d punched him in the face, and we both heard my knuckles crack against the guy’s cheekbone. That pissed him off. He only had to punch me once and I was down, flopping back against the sinks and down onto the floor. I could still see, but none of my limbs would listen to me. The guy kicked me after that, mostly in the stomach; I lost count of how many times before the door opened and it stopped. I looked up. Mikkel had a firm hand on the man’s shoulder, ten years younger but still three inches taller (five, if you counted the hair). _Alright, that’s enough,_ he said, very serious. He offered a couple bills, something we couldn’t really spare back then. _Go get yourself another drink._ The guy glared at him, but took the money and sneered at Gil, who was helping me to my feet. _Tell your pet poof to keep his hands to himself._ Then out he went, to get drunker. Gil kept his arm around me, because I was clinging to him for dear life. Mick’s gaze softened when it found me. _You know how they say to pick on somebody your own size?_ And Gil laughed. _If you’re on tiptoes to punch somebody, probably you shouldn’t fight him._ But, at home, they sat on either side of me and gave me ice in a cloth for my eye. Gil took my hand and lifted my arm in the air. _Our champion fighter, Art Kirkland!_ Mick raised his beer bottle to me, smiling fondly. _Small but mighty._ I said, _Tough as nails._ And my voice cracked and they both laughed kindly at me.

We couldn’t have it exactly like that anymore—and I knew I didn’t want it exactly like that anyway—but it could still be nice, safe, happy. _Anything is better than nothing. I can’t never see my brothers again._ They were part of me, for better or worse. _Which means Bjorn and Matthew are, too._

That one would get easier with time.

 

* * *

 

Bjorn answered the door, which was good, because it was part of the plan. From a pocket of my jacket, I removed a bundle of plastic stems and fabric leaves with a tiny Norwegian flag attached to it. Bjorn accepted the offering, studied it, and asked, “Is this an olive branch?”

I nodded. “You can order anything off Amazon. May I come in? I have a speech memorized and if we get into too much back-and-forth I’ll forget my lines.”

So Bjorn stepped out of the way. Into the house Gil and I went. Gil had promised he was only refereeing if necessary, so I had the floor. Bjorn led us to the living room, where Mick was lounging on the couch. “Who was it, kære?” Then, when he saw me and Gil come in, he said flatly, “Oh.”

I took the remote from the coffee table and turned off the television. “Please be seated. I need to have a serious talk with you all.”

Bjorn glanced at Gil, but he just sat down, totally deadpan. So Bjorn sat beside Mick with his arms crossed over his chest, watching me intently.

I cleared my throat, less because I needed to and more because speeches tended to start with throats being cleared. “First of all. Bjorn. I’m sorry I knocked you down and hit you several times while you were gardening. That was uncalled for.” Bjorn inclined his head slightly, but stayed silent. “I apologize to you again, for hating you so much and being so jealous because you stole Mikkel from the band.”

Mikkel protested, “He didn’t steal anything—”

“Yes, right, I know that now,” I said, waving it off. “But not at the time. So, sorry. We all know I’ve always been a late bloomer, so I guess I just never stopped being a kid. And by kid I mean selfish idiot. But I’m doing my best to be mature. So. Here I am. Oh, and I’m sorry I’ve been disrespectful about you two having kids. I—this is the hardest bit, that’s why I saved it for last.” I wasn’t going to tear up like I did last night when I rehearsed this. No, I wasn’t doing that. My throat felt thick, but I pushed the words out anyway. “I wish my parents were . . . were as good as you’ll be.”

Mick was trying hard not to smile but it wasn’t working so well for him, and Bjorn looked pretty pleased, too. “I accept your apology.”

“So do I,” Mikkel added. “It’s not all your fault. You spent the last year getting clean and healing, and we spent it making lives outside of the band, when it was all you wanted to come back to. You haven’t had nearly as much time as we have. I didn’t want to leave the band behind, too, at first.”

Gil nodded. “Neither did I. It felt weird, putting on respectable clothes.” His lips tugged into a self-deprecating smirk. “But you get used to it pretty quick.”

“I’ll focus on acting respectable first, then I’ll worry about looking the part. But.” I turned back to the Scandinavians. “Final point. I don’t appreciate you saying Bas and I shouldn’t be together, Mr. Thomassen.”

Bjorn nodded, thoughtful. “I just don’t want either of you to be a bad influence on each other. I admit I don’t know any of the full stories, but I think we can all agree that you’ve both been close to dangerous places.”

I didn’t know how much was left out of those stories Bjorn knew, but I knew he wouldn’t do anything evil with the knowledge he did have so it didn’t really matter. “Which is why we can help each other. If you’ve been to the cliff before, it makes it easier to pull somebody else away from the edge.”

Bjorn’s brow furrowed. “You’re very good at making things sound catchy, Arthur.”

“That’s our job,” I told him. “Just because they sound good doesn’t mean they’re wrong.”

Gil and Mick exchanged a glance, the subtitles of which would have read _He’s got you there._

Finally, Bjorn relented. “Alright. If you two are happy and safe together, it’s a positive development.” Before I could celebrate, he asked, “Have you put together a plan yet? I’ve been eagerly waiting.”

 _Oh, I bet you have._ “I’ve got some ideas, but I need to talk to Liz first. Long-term, it’s up in the air. But short-term . . . what do you all think about a farewell concert?”

That made Mick and Gil light up in grins. “The new album?”

“With old songs sprinkled in?”

“Damn right, gentlemen,” I said. “And—”

“A random song,” Bjorn interrupted.

We all stared at him. He said, “Get your fans to choose a random song. Whatever song gets the most upvotes on Reddit, you have to play it at the concert. Fans love interactivity like that.”

I was too taken aback by his knowledge of fandoms and the internet, and his interest in improving the concert, that all I could come up with to say was, “We have a Reddit?”

“We have a subreddit,” Gilbert corrected. “Luddite.”

“Hush, Pinterest.” I snapped my fingers and pointed one of them at Bjorn. “That is a good idea, though. Any others up there?”

Bjorn raised an eyebrow slightly. “I have something to include in your plan.”

“Do tell.”

“Apologizing to Marianne and Antonio. I hear you caused quite the stir.”

I was not going to apologize to Antonio, but I also wasn’t going to bring that up right now. I just said, “Way ahead of you, mate.” That part of the plan was already in motion, actually; I’d already done my part of it. Now it was up to the minions I’d hired.

“How are you gonna do it?” Gilbert asked.

“Hold on, wait a minute.” I held up my hands. “I just remembered.”

“What?”

“I’m rich and famous.”

 

* * *

 

I was barely through the door of Liz’s tasteful office before she was hurling questions at me. “How are people going to buy this album if they don’t know it exists? How do you think we’re going to market this? You know labels have marketing _teams_ , don’t you?”

“People will buy it. They’ll know. The internet is a beautiful thing.” _If people already know you exist,_ I thought, remembering Bas’s plight. “Mostly I’m here to talk to you about a concert. A farewell concert. Last one, ever. We’ll have to film it, obviously. Hire somebody to do it. Actually, can we livestream it? That would be nice to do, don’t you think?”

She stared at me for a good thirty seconds. “You are legitimately insane. All of this takes time and money.”

“Well, I have both of those.”

She blinked, then leaned forward, hands on her desk. “Where are you selling the tickets from? Where’s the venue? We don’t have the FBB website set up to sell tickets.”

I shrugged. “Then I’ll get somebody to set it up so it can. I’ll handle all that. A venue will be found. And I’ll do the social media thing, fuck it. I’ll make sure everyone who cares knows where they can buy the album.”

She tilted her head, both incredulous eyebrows raised. “You’re going to write and record and market and set up the venue and hire someone to film it and hire someone else to set up the website?”

“Sure. It’s my band. I’m leaving it behind. I should do as much of this as I can, right?”

She finally sat back in her chair. “For a decade you’ve never even attempted to do management tasks. Why the sudden responsibility?”

I picked up one of her fancy pens, toying with it instead of looking at her. “If your child was dying, would you be paying someone else to sort out the funeral?”

“Well.” She opened her mouth, then closed it again. “I don’t know. But you haven’t really left anything for me to do. And if the band is breaking up—”

“Retiring,” I corrected.

“If the band is retiring, then I guess you won’t be my client anymore.”

“No, I guess not.”

We sat in expectant, almost rueful silence. No more band meant no more money, so I suspected I was about to hear something along the lines of quitting from her. Or some sort of severance negotiation. It was sort of . . . depressing, to think of it. Liz knew how to rile me, but she knew how to work with me, too. We’d developed an excellent system. It would be quite a shame to end it now, when we’d just gotten good at it.

“So I’ll get you a venue and a crew to film it,” Liz said.

I dropped the pen on the floor. “You will?”

She shook her head a little, chiding. “Don’t look so shocked, Arthur.” She pointed to the wall, and I looked. She had a photographs of herself and all her clients around her office—more than one of her and Roderich, of course—and she was pointing to one of her and the band. We were all sticking out tongues out and holding up rock horns; Gil was making bunny ears behind Liz’s head. In the same gentle tone she’d used on the phone, she said, “Not everyone is out to get you, you know.”

I smiled. “Thank you. You’ve been a lifesaver for us. Seriously. I should thank you a hundred times.”

“A thousand times,” she said. “I know.”

I bent down to get the pen back, replaced it on her desk. “Oh. I had one other thing I wanted to talk to you about. An idea for the future. Since you’re losing an old client, I thought maybe you’d like a new one to replace us.”

She narrowed her eyes a little, that familiar thoughtful look, the look that got things done. She asked, “Who did you have in mind?”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My internet threw my original AN out the window and I can't remember what was in it :c
> 
> I thanked MCR for inspiration, I remember that much. The "I'm not a hero" line is of course from 'Welcome To The Black Parade'. Oh, and "you look like you but louder than normal" is nodding to "you look like you, with the volume turned up" from 'Eleanor & Park'.
> 
> This isn't as good as the original. Curse you, internet, now I'm grumpy >:[
> 
> But, of course, thank you all very much for enjoying my fan service. XO

Over four more sessions, we recorded the rest of the album. It was exactly how recording a final album should have been: the fun of the first time, minus the technical difficulties and human error by virtue of having never recorded music before. If there was any dark clouds hanging over us—you know the ones, the ones that say _this is the last time this will ever happen_ —we couldn’t see them. The best surprise was how liberating it was. There was no _Should we wait to use this later? Would this work better in a different song?_ I kept saying to Mick and Gil, over and over, “Do it. Do it now or forever hold your peace.” There was no holding back. We cranked out song after song. “I don’t want any good ideas left,” I told them. “If one of you call me at three AM a week after this album is finished with a really good idea, I will be quite displeased.” To which Gil and Mick said in almost perfect unison: “You are the only person who calls people at three AM.”

The last session ended up being a week before the concert date, which wasn’t even as close as we’d caught it before (that second album was a lesson in deadline management). We were recording at my place—more intimate that way—and Kiku was here, and I’d made sure to wait at the door so I could see him come in and actively exist outside of a building. But it was raining out, so he’d been under an umbrella and wrapped up in a scarf, so I still had yet to see him take in a single ray of sunlight. “I think you’re one of those people who use a parasol to keep from getting tan,” I told him, and he just said, “You think a lot of things, Mr. Kirkland,” which I was pretty sure meant I was correct.

Alfred and Bas were here—one greeted me with a fist-bump and the other by squeezing my ass—ostensibly to observe, until I got them to supply shouting gang vocals along with Gil and Mikkel. _Louder, louder!_ If I lived closer to other human beings, I would have gone out on the street and dragged people into the booth to shout for me. (And filmed it, of course; Gil was vlogging everything.) Still, it was fine the way it was: more intimate, indeed.

As the quartet dispersed from the mic, I hooked a finger into one of Bas’s belt loops. “Want a royalty?”

He arched an eyebrow, because he knew what I was asking, of course. I was so blessed to have surrounded myself with people who knew what the hell I was talking about. “My scales don’t go as high as yours.”

I wrapped a pair of headphones around his neck and lifted my own onto my ears. “Well, good. I’m not paying you to drown me out, Sinatra.”

I pointed to the board where the words of the chorus were written. This was a quieter, slower song for the most part, but the chorus was powerful. I was pretty proud of it, for something that was inspired by a trip to McDonald’s. It wasn’t quite right with only my vocals, though. A song called _Brothers In Arms_ had to be sung by more than one bloke.

“Follow me,” I said, partly to tell Bas to echo, partly to be potentially used as a sound bite in the song, but mostly because I needed to hear what he would say to that request.

He smiled, so perfect. More perfect than my life should’ve been allowed to be, at this point. “Always.”

And then we brought new meaning to the word _harmonize._ I’d sung with other people before, usually other rock singers, and it usually ended up being a shouting fest because my voice didn’t really blend well with others; I either couldn’t be heard at all or someone’s midrange got lost. But now, this was so, so right. Bas had experience singing with Antonio—who was lower than me but still higher than Bas—and I had a bit of skill in threading my voice through the rest of the noise, so together it was just bliss. I could feel myself grinning and he smiled back, and we had those perfect joined notes that even the most stoic fucker on the planet could feel in his heart, and we challenged each other, me bringing it up high in the throat and him meeting me as high as he could in the chest, but damned if those notes didn’t sound like they came easy as breathing to him. I’d thought I could remember what the old days of making music felt like, but I’d forgotten this, that purest feeling beyond the fuckery of punk and noise and appearance and attitude. Singing _for_ someone was lovely. Singing _with_ someone was heaven.

When we were finished, everyone applauded, even Kiku. Bas tried to hide it, but I could see the light that came into his eyes. Was this the first time he’d been applauded for his singing? Or just the first time in a while? Either way, I was glad to be here for it. I offered him a fist. “Congrats. You’re officially a rockstar.”

He ignored the fist and kissed me instead, hard enough that when he pulled back his smirk was blurry for a moment. “Thanks.”

The kiss had them all clapping again—not Kiku this time—and Mikkel and Alfred wolf-whistling while Gil called, “Get some!”

“Alright, you animals, relax.” I glanced over at Gil, who was holding up a video camera (camcorders didn’t interfere with microphones). “Did you film that?”

“Of course I did,” he replied pleasantly.

“He zoomed in on it and everything,” Alfred agreed.

“Well.” I exchanged an amused glance with Bas. “That’s gonna piss off the Marthur fangirls.” I slipped one hand into Bas’s back pocket and blew a kiss to Mikkel with my other hand. “We’ll always have Copenhagen.”

“The fangirls will get over it,” Mikkel said, with as much good nature as I expected. “Do the reveal, Gil.”

Gil took out his phone with his other hand, pausing to turn it on. “By popular demand, the random song we will perform at our last concert is . . .” He glanced at Alfred. “Drum roll?”

Alfred shrugged. “You’re the drummer here.”

“My hands are full.”

I went over to slap a drum roll onto Mick’s back. Bas’s leather jacket would’ve been more percussive, but I didn’t want to set a precedent for so-called playful hitting with him. I’d made that mistake with Marianne and I was pretty sure I still had a little dent in my arm from her demonic nails.

“Thanks, Art,” Mikkel said—again, with as much good nature as I expected.

“Get on with it,” I said. “The suspense is killing us all.”

“Okay, the song is—” He had to stop and laugh. “Oh, man. Ahem. _Video Killed the Radio Star_.”

I whirled on Sebastião. “I KNOW YOU’RE BEHIND THIS.”

Now he was grinning, eyes bright with mischief. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gilbert was still laughing. “People are pissed _American Idiot_ didn’t win.”

I pointed at the camera, righteous. “I told you to be on best behavior, Internet, and this is what you give me?”

“Hey, it could be worse,” Alfred said. He was the only one who couldn’t tell I wasn’t actually upset. Once, I would’ve been upset. Now it was just funny, really. But that wasn’t the reaction I was expected to give—and for the good people, I would perform, one last time.

“Yeah, it could be Taylor Swift,” Mikkel said.

“Or Selena Gomez.”

“Or Justin—”

 _“Silence.”_ I stood in front of my rack of guitars, arms spread to protect them. “Don’t taint this room. They’re only children.”

Gil laughed, high and giddy. “What? I was gonna say Timberlake.”

I covered my ears. “I’m gonna have to get a priest in here to bless the house now.”

After Kiku left to finish up the mixing at his studio, we all lounged in the living room with three pizzas on the coffee table. I sat on the end of one of the sofas, between Sebastião and Mikkel. Bas tugged on the strap of my glove—which was too cute to snap at—and asked, “What’s so interesting on your phone, amado?”

I looked up at him, then gazed darkly into the middle distance even though Gil wasn’t vlogging anymore. I turned my phone so they could see the lyrics and intoned in defeat: _“I heard you on my wireless back in ’52.”_

They all burst out laughing. Gil almost choked on those bloody mushrooms, Bas slid his arm around my shoulders to give me a little squeeze, and I just shook my head. _The things I do for fans._

 

* * *

 

One of the days of that last week before the concert, me and my brothers went in for a soundcheck. Liz had gotten us a show at a amphitheater an hour and a half away, which was a bonus I hadn’t even asked for; tour buses were great fun, until you’d been in one for more than five consecutive hours. During the busiest tours, we didn’t actually show up to gigs for soundchecks; they just played a recording of us to test the levels and feedback.

“Ah, this brings me back,” Gilbert said, sticks wandering back and forth across his kit, the pounding equivalent of strumming across every string on the guitar. “Louder?”

“Louder,” I agreed. I had a feeling the audience would be particularly raucous this time around.

He nodded. “This’ll be the first show in a while where you’re sober, right? When was the last one?”

I shrugged, picking absently. “No idea.”

Mick chuckled. “Remember the last one in New York? You could barely stand up.”

“I _didn’t_ stand up.” I’d staggered to and fro through sixteen minutes of music, and then the stage had stopped existing. I’d fallen into the orchestra pit, which thankfully had cushioned seats to soften the landing. _That_ had been uploaded to YouTube from several different angles. But you better believe we finished the set, once I was fished out of that damned pit.

“Remember the very first concert?” Gil asked, and I was tempted to protest the wistful tone in his voice, because if I was saying it like that somebody would probably get on my arse about regressing. But all three of us were remembering it, and we all felt wistful about it, because how could we not? Young and terrified, that was us our first show. Nobody filmed it; we weren’t famous enough for anybody to care that much. But it existed in our memories, and what an endless night it had been. I’d sung myself raw, and every raspy, painful word the next day was worth it.

“The last one will be better than the first,” I said. I was a bit surprised to hear it out loud, but I believed it; I might as well voice it.

Gilbert’s mouth tugged into a smile. “You think so?”

“I know so,” said Mikkel, before I could. He didn’t smile, but his eyes were warm as he extended a fist to me. “I’d love to stay and reminisce, but I gotta hit the road. I have a lesson.”

I knocked my knuckles against his. “Tell him to always wear a condom and eat vegetables.”

Mick paused in fistbumping Gil to raise an eyebrow at me. “The kid is nine. And a girl.”

“Girls need veg, too. I’m shocked at your ignorance.”

He shook his head, leaving his guitar in its case and heading offstage, to the back exit.

Gilbert rose, stretching his arms like he was about to lift weights. “I’m gonna miss saving your ass from drunk idiots.”

I carefully set Black Beauty into her case. “Well, if Matthew’s photography career doesn’t pan out I’ll hire you as a bodyguard.”

Before I could even straighten up, Gil was grabbing me in a bear hug. Not just any bear hug, either. A rough, tight Germanic bear hug with quick, demonic drummer hands darting left and right to tickle their defenseless prey. My cries of _fuck off!_ were not as convincing as I’d hoped, judging by his grin. “What? I thought rockstars didn’t giggle!”

Abruptly, he went still and I stumbled free of his grasp. I was about to chastise him savagely for daring to manhandle his frontman, but his serious face—not unhappy, but no longer playful—stopped me. “Hey,” he said, “I’ll wait for you in the car, okay?”

I didn’t understand until I turned and saw Antonio and Marianne walking up an aisle toward the stage. Gilbert hopped off the stage and nodded to them as they passed each other. I realized I was being trusted to deal with this interaction without conflict, and though I was a bit minged that I’d gotten to the point where that was an accomplishment, I was glad for it nonetheless.

But I didn’t have a speech prepared.

Shite.

I slung my guitar over my shoulder and had my head lowered to tune it—even though it was already perfectly tuned—so I wouldn’t have to look anyone in the eye as Antonio and Marianne joined me onstage. I wanted to stick with my artificial distraction and wait until someone spoke to look up— _oh, hello, didn’t see you there_ —but they were calling my bluff. No one said anything. She knew me too well. I surrendered and let my eyes flick up to them.

Antonio was watching me with a bit of impatience pressing on his mouth, but Marianne just looked faintly amused. “We came to thank you,” she said.

“Oh?” I asked. “For what?”

Now they wore matching _oh, come on_ faces. There wasn’t any mystery, I was just being a twat. It wasn’t that I didn’t receive gratitude a lot, it was just that there were very few, specific things I could be thanked for at any given time—which wasn’t great, probably, but it was better than nothing. I’d sent in a crew of people to fill Marianne’s studio with flowers—two florists’ worth, apparently—and for the handsomest of the crew to present her with a rose in such a way that she could read the tag attached to the stem of said rose which read _Veuillez m’excuser_ in the enchanting handwriting of yours truly.

“I got the right address, then? Good.” I let my guitar hang in front of me and rested my hands on top of the body. “I’d hate to hear they put them in _his_ studio.”

Antonio’s eyes blazed, but his voice kept more or less civil. “Can I ask you a question? Why do you hate me so much?”

The sky was falling: the angrier he got, the calmer I felt, and it was fucking great. “Honestly, at this point the biggest grudge I, personally, have against you is the fact that you’re a popstar. I can’t support that lifestyle with a good Christian conscience.” I lifted a hand to blow a fleck of black nail polish off my thumb. I was waiting for the concert to put a fresh coat on. “But I share a grudge with your brother, and that one is actually serious.”

Antonio held up his hands, face contorting with exasperated inquiry.

I shook my head. Did Bjorn feel this righteous and holy when he talked to me? Wow. What a drug. “Oh, you know what you did. You two had a deal and you broke it. That’s not cool, mate.”

Antonio deflated a little, sighing. “I _know._ But I’ve offered to speak to the label for him. Does he want me to? No. He gets angry, he yells at me. We fight all over again. He doesn’t want my help. I just want my brother back.” His voice didn’t even have to waver for Marianne to slide closer, stroke a comforting hand up and down his arm. He twined their fingers, but his gaze stayed on me, heavy. “I don’t know what he wants from me.”

I felt even holier with my utter lack of jealousy at Marianne’s loving touches. “I do.”

There was actual, honest-to-God hope in his eyes. “What?”

“An apology, thicko.”

Antonio moved away from his girlfriend—yep, I could even say that without wincing, look at me fucking go—so he could tug at his hair. “ _I have apologized._ Many times. It just makes him fight with me.”

I spared a moment to consider if Bas would appreciate me doing this, interfering. Was it interfering? Intervention, in my admittedly limited experience, was a good thing. So I didn’t bother feeling guilty about it. But I also didn’t bother troubling myself with planning to tell Bas about this. Better for it to seem like Antonio’s idea. _Christ._ Alright, that one was a bit sickening.

“Yeah, but how are you apologizing?” I asked. “What are you actually saying?”

Antonio’s hands dropped to his sides, and of course his tousled hair remained photogenic as ever. “I don’t know. I tell him I wish things could have gone differently. I tell him I’m sorry they didn’t want him to be in on the deal.”

“I’m not hearing you say the words _I’m sorry I broke our promise, dear brother_.” I raised an eyebrow. “Are you not sorry for doing that?”

Antonio stared at me, startled. “Well, I . . .” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I didn’t think we would be separated when we made the promise. It was foolish, I guess. Things rarely go the way you plan.”

“You could’ve said no to the label,” I pointed out, mostly just so I could enjoy seeing him squirm. “But whatever, you didn’t. You got your break. Now you should put that singer/songwriter brain to good use and put together a real apology for Sebastião. A good, long apology this time. Longer than your three-minute pop songs.”

He nodded, guilt quickly devoured by irritation. “What am I supposed to do when he fights with me?”

“Just tell him you want to be honest with him. And mention you’re a feckhead, that’ll make him listen.”

His brow furrowed, but I suspected he could puzzle out what that particular word meant. “Okay.”

I raised a hand to gesture to the pair of them. “You came here to say thank you, and now I say you’re welcome. That ended up nice and tidy.”

Marianne stepped forward to give a light kiss to both my cheeks before smiling at me. “Good luck with your concert, Arthur.”

I might have been troubled by that, but all I could smell was that damned lip gloss. “You could come. I could get you VIP passes. I know a guy.” Her mouth was laughing but her eyes were uncertain, so I added, “You can even bring Toni, if you leave a window cracked.”

Now they both gave me disapproving looks, and I laughed. “Oh, relax. Smile, yeah? At least come see your brother. He’s opening for us.”

Antonio’s eyes widened. “He—he is? Oh. Well, good for him. Sure, I’ll come. To see him, I mean.”

You had to give him credit. I wouldn’t have left the _Not you_ silent at the end.

“See you there, then,” I said, leaning to switch the amp back on. It hummed quietly, waiting. I waited, too, until my guests were a few strides down the aisle. Then I called, “Hey. I didn’t get a thank you for my advice.”

They stopped, turned. As soon as Antonio’s mouth opened, I strummed. Black Beauty’s glorious sound filled the whole place. I palmed the strings to silence their vibration. “Sorry, what was that?”

Antonio’s eyes narrowed, but he tried again.

I played an F major loud enough to vaporize small animals and cupped my fretting hand around my ear. “You’ll have to speak up!”

Antonio abandoned Marianne to run back up onto the stage. He grabbed the mic I’d been testing earlier and shouted into it, “YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE!”

I shredded wildly at him, then took the mic back as the gleeful snarls faded out. “Ladies and gentlemen, Toni Carriedo’s hardcore rock debut!”

Marianne applauded, even as she doubled over with laughter. That still felt good.

Antonio was shaking his head at me, but he was smiling, too. “I can see it now.”

“Me too,” I said, switching off the amplifier and the microphone. “You with black lipstick.”

“No.” His tone sounded bizarre to me, and I realized it had respect in it. I turned to him, and he was watching me with faint but genuine warmth in his eyes. “I could never understand why Mari would get with someone like you. But now I can see it.” He gave me a nod of farewell. “See you at the concert.”

Once they left, there were no eyes on me, but I still bowed to the empty seats. _Good show, old chap._

 

* * *

 

The week leading up to the concert date, Sebastião stayed at my place later and later into the evening each day. The night before the concert, we were still on my bed—lying head-to-toe, eating caramel popcorn, get your mind out of the gutter—by eleven. I was wary of scaring him away, but at this point the answer was pretty obvious to me. So I poked his shoulder with my toe (which had gotten a fresh coat of nail polish along with my fingers, even though all of two people would ever see it) and asked, “Are you staying here tonight?”

“I think so.” He wrapped his fingers around my ankle. “Am I invited?”

I was tempted to pretend to kick him, but his warm hand felt too nice on my skin. “You’ve been invited for a month.”

Something unhappy pinched his lips, and he slid his hand up so it covered the ugly scar on my shin. “Is this going too fast? I’ve never had a relationship like this. They’ve all just been sex, pretty much.”

“Really? You’re really good at it.” I crunched a bit of popcorn, salty sweet. “I mean, the relationship, not the sex. Well, you’re probably good at sex, too. If not, I’ll help you out. I’m pretty much an expert.”

Bas laughed. That merry light was becoming more and more common in his eyes; I hadn’t realized how low he was when we met until I saw him like this. Earnest, he said, “I’m trying very hard to not fuck this up.”

I scooted forward, knees bent, until I could touch his cheek. “I appreciate it. But I don’t think it’s too fast for a sleepover. Separate showers?”

He smiled, nuzzled into my hand a little. “Mmm. Probably a good idea.”

So I showered first and pretended not to see his eyes all over me when I came out in my towel. Drying my hair, I heard snatches of his voice, at once muffled and amplified by the acoustics of the bathroom. It was Spanish, and I was pretty sure I heard the word _amado_ in there. I smiled to myself.

When Bas came out, he found me sat naked on the foot of the bed, strumming his guitar upside-down in my lap. While his eyes devoured me—the guitar was providing tasteful censorship—I let my own devour him. _He should wear towels more often._ He wasn’t built like an anatomy sculpture, muscles carved into skin stretched so tight it always looked painful to me, and he wasn’t so skinny all his bones were on display, like me. He was comfortably in the middle, and the line of his hips disappearing under that towel . . . I picked out a short, shy chord—I didn’t know this acoustic animal, so I’d let it sniff my fingers first—and hummed. Watching Bas’s smile spread as he recognized the melody he was singing in the shower: oh, yes. Happiness. This could be life, forever. Yes.

I sang:

_I wanted to write you a song_

_But I didn’t know_

_It’s easier to play a right-hand guitar_

_Than it is to sing slow._

Now he grinned. He sat beside me, put an arm around my shoulders so he could fret while I strummed. He sang:

_I’ve tried to write a song for you_

_But I could never choose_

_If I should sing about your eyes_

_About your smile_

_Or about your tattoos._

I smiled at him, and he snaked his other arm around the guitar to strum sharply.

_Or about the party where you_

_Threw up on my shoes._

I blinked, then realized he must’ve meant the party where I was snockered, where I couldn’t remember meeting him. What a wasted opportunity that had been. Oh well. I was making up for it now. I strummed, but my fingers stumbled a little with the awkward verse.

_Well normally about that shit_

_I’d stay reserved_

_But if they were bloody monk shoes_

_Then it was deserved._

Bas groaned, grinning. “God, that one was bad.”

I nudged his side. “Did I actually—?”

He nodded, strumming with far more skill and nuance than I’d been bothering with. “You passed out for a while so I stayed in the bedroom with you. I didn’t know if the people at the party could be trusted. Besides Mick and Gil, I mean.”

“No.” I didn’t remember who was there, and that proved the point in itself.

“Well, then.”

“So you’ve been saving me for years,” I said, leaning into him.

“We’ve been saving each other for years.” Warm, fond green eyes flashed to me, then away as he sang in a lower, thinner voice than before. It rose and fell along with the chords, so poignant I actually had tears pricking the backs of my eyes, overflowing from the bittersweet wave crashing through my heart.

_Seeing you fall apart made feel_

_Not so alone made me feel_

_When I was standing on that_

_Bridge all alone made me feel . . ._

He trailed off, picking the same melancholy chord over and over, gaze lowered. I watched him, leaned to kiss his cheek. I sung softly now.

_Seeing you get better makes me feel_

_So much better makes me feel_

_So much steadier now that_

_I’m not alone makes me feel . . ._

He turned to look at me, and I couldn’t sing anymore, I had to kiss him—which was fine, because he was already leaning to kiss me. It started just love, but lust didn’t take long to find us, and the kiss deepened and deepened until Bas lowered his guitar to the floor and lay back, pulling me on top of him. For a second I wondered if I was going to have to go something I was _really_ rusty at, and then Bas rolled us over and I twined my legs around his waist. Oh, he felt so fucking good against me. How had I waited this long? Because he had wanted to. Because he had wanted us to last. And we would.

“Thank you,” I murmured into his mouth, “for saving me.”

“Thank you,” he whispered against my throat, “for happening to me.”

And we were together, as close as a harmony could get without becoming one voice, and it was worth the wait.

 

* * *

 

_VVVVVVVMMMMM. VVVVVVVVMMMMM._

I opened my eyes, bleary. Morning light was punching and kicking through the blinds. I was on my stomach, and a glance over my shoulder verified that the weight on me was indeed Bas’s arm and leg. His head was mostly on my pillow, as well, wavy hair fanned out like a dark halo. He did snore, a bit, but nowhere near as bad as Mikkel— _it’s because I broke my nose once, I can’t help it_ —so I had no complaints. The sound of my phone slowly but surely vibrating its way off the nightstand was more annoying. I pawed it before it could crash to the floor, saw that Gilbert was calling me, and answered with a groggy groan.

“You’re not up yet?” _Morning people._ “It’s almost noon! The concert’s at nine.”

“That’s in nine hours, then.” But the words still swirled excitedly around my belly.

“Ja, but I thought you were doing giveaways today.”

 _Oh, shit._ I was awake now. “Right you are. Talk to you later, mate.”

“Thank you, Gil. You’re welcome, Gil,” he said.

“That’s the first sign of insanity, you know,” I told him, and hung up. I hurried over to Twitter—opening my calendar and my calculator along the way because apparently my thumbs weren’t awake yet—and tweeted.

**First giveaway listen up internet**

It didn’t take long for the likes and comically misspelled freak-out responses to come rolling in. Bas woke up around then, shifting his limbs off of me and propping himself up on an elbow. “What are you doing?”

I was grateful for no insistence on a _good morning_ kiss; it was a staple of mornings with Marianne (when she wasn’t pissed at me) and I had never been a fan. Morning sex, fine. Morning kisses should take place after toothpaste has gotten involved.

I showed him my screen. “I need a question about me to ask them.”

“Favorite sex position.”

“Too many people know that.”

He snorted, so I said, “No, really, I said it in an interview once. What are you, some kind of fake fan?”

“Ha ha ha.” One of his hands wandered between my shoulder blades. “Ask them the name of the first track of your original set of the _Dressed Up_ tour.”

The set’s first track was originally the first track on the album, but it ended up using too much of us so we put it at the end, because one messy breathy song was better than fifty minutes of them. “Clever girl. Cheers, lovey.”

“You’re welcome.” He said this through a stretch that showed off his lovely bronze abdomen and the lovely line of coarse black curls that trailed down that abdomen. _Treasure trail_ had never been a more accurate phrase. My timbers were still shivering. “I’m gonna go have a shower.”

I watched him go—and enjoyed the view—then quickly typed up the question and scurried off to the bathroom to join him. It took us fifteen minutes to get clean, then dirty, then clean again—it could’ve been longer but hot water and hotter Spaniards really did a number on a man’s stamina—and when I got back to the phone there were almost a hundred responses to the Tweet. Not all were actual answers to the trivia, not even close, but the first proper reply was the correct answer, so that made my life easy. I wondered if the girl knew it off the top of her head or if she had to Google it, but I supposed it didn’t really matter. There were seven guitars to give away, after all; at least one would end up going to an adoring fan who wasn’t just trying to resell my signed instruments. I congratulated the girl and told her to DM me her mailing address and I’d send the guitar sooner or later.

Barely five minutes had passed and my phone buzzed at me. Not the girl. Mikkel.

**@ArthurKland ‘Sooner or later.’ Very specific, Art.**

I showed my screen to Sebastião. “Look at this. Dissension in the ranks.”

He read the tweet, then took the phone from me, tapped something out, and offered it back. I read it.

**@mickdensen Don’t you have some hair gel to buy?**

“My God.” I tossed my phone into the no man’s land of sheets the bed had become. “Marry me.”

He smirked, tugging his damp hair into a ponytail. “Let’s get through today first.”

 

* * *

 

An hour before the concert, everyone came to the house to get dressed up because I had plenty of space, bathrooms to go around, and because back in the day getting dressed up for shows had been the three of us tripping over each other in a tiny bathroom, bending over each other to all see ourselves in the mirror, smudging eyeliner on the way out the door, hacking at pairs of jeans with scissors last-minute because they simply didn’t look _who gives a fuck_ enough. But when I say everyone came, I mean _everyone._ Mikkel brought Bjorn, and Matthew and Alfred came in with Gilbert. Matthew clung to his boyfriend and his brother at first, but Bjorn’s gentle inclusion of him—asking his opinion on the different outfits Mick was trying on, getting his help with The Spikening of Mick’s hair—slowly but surely brought him out of his shell. Once Mikkel’s hair was standing up like blond fire frozen in place, we all stood round to admire it.

“Shhhh,” Gil said, holding a finger to his lips. “Nobody make any loud noises. His hair will collapse.”

When Matthew and Alfred smiled, I was pleased to see Matthew’s was nearly as bright and wide as his brother’s. But not pleased enough to let Gil have the last laugh: “You kidding? You could beat that fucking hair with a baseball bat and you’d end up with wood chips.”

“Alright, alright.” Mikkel gave Gil’s shoulder a comradely punch. “Your turn, Beilschmidt.”

Gil’s hair took less preparation. Bjorn and Matthew helped him put in a metallic silver dye, which would make his hair really light up under the lights at the concert. While they were doing that, Alfred glanced at me. “You’re not dying your hair?”

“Nah.” I’d had it pretty much every color over the years—rainbow, once, because it was June and because Mick dared me I wouldn’t—but it didn’t feel right to dye it just for the final show. The color would linger, then fade; I wanted tonight to be by itself, set apart from everything else so nothing could diminish it. But I had gotten my undercut back, probably for the last time because Bas had looked rather glum to see the hair go, and he’d told me afterward, _It’s not as soft when it’s buzzed short._

The clothes were far from the craziest we’d ever worn, but they were more than the jeans and T-shirt I’d half-expected Mick to show up in. Bjorn was actually saying things like _No, that’s not crooked enough_ and _Put the chain through here_ and _Leave the buckles loose, it looks more punkish that way._ I gave him a surprised look, and he shrugged. “Well, if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right.”

I turned back to the mirror, raising my pencil. “Amen to that.”

Mikkel and I had eyeliner on, but Gilbert had opted for lipstick instead because his eyes got irritated too easily. “I’ll be in shades by the end of the show, anyway.” The lights were hard on those red eyes. Still, he was striking in the lipstick; somehow it made his cheekbones more pronounced. “It looks nice on you,” Matthew murmured to him, and I left to go help Bas before I could find out if Gil wound up reapplying that layer on his lips.

Sebastião wasn’t in punk clothes like we were. He had boots on, and tight jeans, but no abundance of black. Really, he looked like anybody. If he had a straw hat, he could have been a country singer. _No identity,_ nagged a voice in my head. If people remembered what he looked like, they would remember because he was _That guy that looks like Toni Carriedo._ He stood in front of a mirror, buttoning then unbuttoning then rebuttoning the top two buttons of his shirt. When he saw my reflection beside his own, he asked, “Chest hair or no chest hair?”

“Chest hair. Definitely.” I looked him up and down. Black boots, dark blue jeans, pale green shirt, brown leather jacket. He looked _good_ , but he didn’t look like . . . well, a star. It wasn’t enough for eyes to stay on you because you looked nice; eyes had to stay on you because they could not look away, because they couldn’t make sense of you, because they might miss something bizarre or amazing if they so much as blinked. “Could I maybe try something on you?”

He looked down at himself, too, and I wondered if his troubled expression was because he was thinking the same thoughts I was. “Yeah, okay.”

I tore my closet apart looking for a shirt I’d never actually worn because I’d ordered it online and it was too big for me. “No, don’t look,” I said, hands behind my back. “I want you to wait and look when I’m done.”

He hesitated, but trusted me to close his eyes. Off came the jacket and the button-up, and on went my shirt. His brow furrowed at the sensation of the fabric, but he kept his eyes closed. I helped him slide the jacket back on, then asked, “Can I put some makeup on you? Just a little?”

I’d never seen him in makeup, but he nodded without question. I picked up the eyeliner pencil, then left it and picked up the eye shadow kit instead. I didn’t really know how to use it properly, despite watching tutorials—yes, I had taken time out of my life to do that and no, I would never get those minutes back—so it was slowly and carefully that I applied the shadow to Bas’s left eye, then his right. He made a soft sound halfway through, and I froze. “Did I hurt you?” But he just replied, “This is relaxing.” I went back to my careful work, relieved. “Well, good. I’ll go into cosmetology.”

When I was done, I pulled back. This was better, but I couldn’t get my hopes up in case he didn’t like it. Really, it wasn’t the end of the world if he didn’t look like a star, because he didn’t _sound_ like the mainstream stars out there, and more than likely he wouldn’t be part of that circle. I hadn’t been trying to make him look mainstream, either. I just wanted him to look like himself, but louder than normal. “Alright. Open your eyes.”

He looked at himself. His face didn’t change, at first; he just took it in. I’d traded his regular belt for one studded with rhinestones—not a lot of rhinestones, but enough—and his shirt was a skintight black fishnet affair that wasn’t originally intended to be worn outside of the bedroom but most definitely could be. The hole-to-fabric ratio was such that it would be hard to see skin from most seats in the audience; you had to be up close and personal to make out nipples under there. But it was _different_ , that was the point. Plain sex appeal would have him strutting about shirtless; this wasn’t straying too far from what Bas wanted, and—to me, anyway—it was more tantalizing than bare skin would be. As for his eyes, they did what I’d hoped. It wasn’t the harsh pop eyeliner gave; more subtle, smokey, mysterious. And the bit of green I’d tried to mix in there just made his irises look better, so I hadn’t ruined things there.

His brow lowered a little, and he tilted his head from side to side, looking at the eyeshadow. “Is there green in there?”

“Yes.” I watched him closely. “What do you think?”

He ran a hand down his chest. “I think I might get cold.”

I had to laugh at that. “Trust me, in a room with a thousand people, it’s impossible to be cold.”

He smiled a little, self-deprecating, and that little twitch of his lips told me how nervous he was. I put my arm around him. “You’ll do great, kid.”

As expected, that had his eyebrow arching. His arms circled me, menacing. “Kid?”

I had a bad habit of dating people who looked really hot when they were angry. “There, if you feel nervous, remember this feeling. You’re ferocious. You’re fierce. Big bad Bas.”

He hesitated, then gave one of those _oh I can’t stay mad at you_ smiles usually reserved for troublesome puppies. “If not cosmetology, then motivational speaking.”

Alfred poked his head in the room, smiling sheepishly when he saw us. “Oh, sorry. Guess Mattie’s not in here.” He vanished from the doorway, then reappeared. “Uh, shouldn’t you get dressed, Arthur?”

I nodded, freeing myself of Bas’s arms. “Pray for me.”

Ten minutes later, I walked out of my walk-in closet to find Bas, Mick, and Gil waiting for me. Well, I didn’t so much _walk_ as hop, because I was still hauling on my leather skinnies. I hadn’t worn them in months, and they were giving me more of a workout than the aerobics twat who came to the rehab clinic twice a week.

Gil and Mick were smirking, so I said, “If you two could just grab either side of these and pull, that would be great.”

They shook their heads. “If you can’t get it on yourself, that’s a sign not to wear it.”

“That’s weak,” I declared, breathless. I gave one mighty tug that sent me falling backward onto the bed, but at last the pants were up. And now for the button. “Fuck me _run_ ning—”

“It’s all that damn pudding,” Mikkel told me. “Welcome to your metabolism.”

“Better pudding than cocaine,” Gilbert pointed out.

“Nobody ever OD’d on pudding,” Sebastião agreed, trying valiantly not to laugh.

“THERE.” I stood up slowly, breathed experimentally, and slapped my thigh in triumph. “They’re on and they’re not coming off.”

Gil and Bas applauded my efforts—Bas walking behind me to truly appreciate how skinny the skinnies were—but Mikkel shook his head at me. “If we have to cut you out of another pair of pants—”

Bas perked up even more. “Another?”

“Ancient history never mind,” I said quickly, then spread my arms; several tiny chains jangled. _It’s happening._ This high never got old. “It’s time to make some magic.”

 

* * *

 

Liz had indeed gotten us a venue and someone to record the show; the amphitheater was filled with people, and I counted no less than six cameras scattered around the place, most aimed at the stage and a couple aimed at the audience. There was a laptop backstage set up to receive the livestream, and I couldn’t stop looking at the shots of the crowd. We hadn’t sold out—Liz blamed the rather short notice of the whole thing—but we had enough warm bodies that any empty seats were hard to notice with the seething herd of standing people. I’d always liked the standers more. Front and center, they were the ones I could actually see through smoke and shadow and blinding lights. And they were the ones that I could hear well enough to talk to between songs, too. But I would shake hands and hug and sign stuff for anyone, and I hoped I’d be able to get a lot of people after the show. I’d probably be run completely into the ground by the time this was all over, but that was a good thing. _Purge it all,_ that’s what my rehab roommate had said. That’s what I was doing tonight.

Stagehands were running around, giving us water and making sure our instruments were alright. _Exits are here and here._ Same old thing. The frantic progress was actually calming to watch, since it was so familiar. Matthew and Bas weren’t comforted, though. “Hey,” I said to Matthew, who had a white-knuckled grip on Alfred’s hand. “See your poster over there? Looks great.”

It did, too. It was the three of us, backlit against a sunset we’d had to drive like hell to time properly, facing away from the camera and sitting on tacky lawn chairs. Mikkel had his arms crossed behind his head, Gilbert had a hand raised in rock horns, and in the middle I had both hands up to V sign the viewer or God or whoever else you’d like. Above us, in a minimalist font: _Once More for the Cheap Seats._

Matthew’s smile was so faint it might not even have existed. I touched the VIP pass hanging around his neck. “See this? That means nobody can fuck with you.”

Matthew looked down at it, then at me, bravery fighting through his shyness. I smiled at him, then turned to Sebastião. He was looking less anxious and more green now, so I twined our fingers to pull him aside. His hand was soaked, and mine was, too, now. “Bloody hell. You’ll be dehydrated in five minutes at this rate.”

I grabbed a stagehand and got her to give us a roll of paper towel, which I mummified Bas’s hands with. “Deep breaths,” I said, squeezing his hands in mine. “What are you scared of?”

Bas shook his head, watching the stagehands, glancing toward the glow of the stage, quivering every time the background noise of the crowd got louder. “Opening.”

I reached up to grasp his chin, forcing him to look at me. “What are you scared of?”

His bright, tormented gaze searched my face. Quietly, he said, “Rejection.”

“Nobody is kicking you off my stage,” I said firmly. “They want to hear you. They’ve been telling us all week.” Breakfast two days ago had been us feeding each other grapes and bits of pineapple—it counted as fruit salad, shut up—and reading the excited comments fans were posting about the concert. My announcement that Bas would be opening had started a fair bit of discussion, and I was beyond relieved that it was mostly optimistic. The Internet had been on best behavior, after all. “If you need me to come out, just wave me on, alright? I’ll be watching.”

Sebastião nodded, still not totally calm. There was no way to get rid of all the nerves, except getting wasted, so I’d done all I could for him. Still, I framed his face in my hands and told him, “You’re badass and sexy and you can swear in Spanish. Even Satan himself would not dare oppose you.”

He laughed, at last. “Thank you, amado.”

A stagehand was hovering with his guitar, so I took it and slung the strap over Bas’s shoulder. “Time to go, lovey,” I said, nudging him toward the stage. “Knock ’em dead.”

Out he went, and up came the lights. I joined the others to watch his entrance on the laptop. He was walking a bit stiff, and I could see a tremor in his hand as he waved to the crowd. They cheered for him, quiet at first, then louder when they realized who he was. He was hiding his nerves as best he could, saying the lines he’d rehearsed with me to warm up the crowd. He was doing his smirky smile, but his voice had a hint of shakiness in it, and I hoped to God he wouldn’t hear it and collapse.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Marianne and Antonio coming to stand beside me, but I didn’t look away from the screen. Little kid logic: if I kept watching, nothing bad would happen.

“He looks nervous,” Marianne said, concerned.

“He looks like he’s auditioning for _X Factor_ ,” Antonio said, with a salty taste of criticism in there.

“He didn’t want bells and whistles,” I said, because he was just a man with a guitar and a microphone, and being unafraid to be simply that was a noble thing these days.

Bas had two songs to open with, a faster one and a slower one. I’d told him to start with the slower of the two—I wanted him to pump them up before we came on—and he did as I said, even though I knew he would rather tear into something quick to cloak his nerves. Still, once he got a minute into the song, he’d shrugged off most of the misplaced terror and his voice had loosened up beautifully. He ended on a particularly sweet note, and the feed cut to emotional faces in the crowd turned blue by the lights; whoever was operating the camera for the wide shots had zoomed in on a girl wiping tears from her cheek. _My God,_ I thought, _this does look like_ X Factor. But the crowd loved it, cheering and clapping and even whistling when he smiled at them. I found myself smiling, too. _Bask in it. You deserve it._

And then somebody had to shout, “BRING ON FBB! THAT’S WHAT WE’RE HERE FOR!”

Just like that, Sebastião’s bravado slipped and he looked to the side, searching for me, I knew. _Fuck._ I hurried to the side of the stage, out of sight of the audience because I would not reward bad behavior. The asshole was still shouting, and other people were joining in now. Bas’s brow crinkled in in concern, eyes asking me, almost pleading: _forget about the second song?_ I was so tempted to go out and save him, but I knew I couldn’t steal his moment. So I grabbed my signing Sharpie, wrote on the back of a small poster, and held it up for him: **_YOUR VOICE > THEIR VOICE._ ** And I pointed to the mic.

Bas looked at me, then out to the crowd. Then he edged closer to the mic. “You want Arthur?”

They _screamed._

And he said, devilish and sardonic and sexy, “Then let’s warm the mic up for him.”

And then he ripped into an even faster version of the song than he’d been practising through the past week, winding them all up with seductive, thrilling Spanish lyrics and a chorus that leapt from strum to blistering strum. Every bastard in the room was trying to sing along by the end, utterly butchering the Spanish parts. It was glorious.

They were cheering even before he finished, and when he said, “Gracias,” they really went wild. He started walking off, but I met him halfway and wrapped an arm around him, dragged him back to centerstage, and grabbed the mic stand. Now they were losing their fucking minds, but I was good at being heard. “WHAT’S HIS NAME?”

Crowds had very limited skills, but they could certainly chant: _“SEBAS-TIÃO! SEBAS-TIÃO!”_

“HOW MUCH DO YOU LOVE HIM?”

If their first scream was deafening, it hardly compared to the wails when I said, “NOT AS MUCH AS I DO,” and kissed him. I knew Bjorn was probably shaking his head at me backstage, but I couldn’t help it. The stage made me honest, and I wanted nothing more than to kiss Bas until he knew how proud of him I was.

“You survived,” I said when we finally pulled apart. “Enjoy your life.”

I could feel the quiver in Bas’s breath as he realized it was over, he’d done it. I’d never seen him hold so much energy; I’d never seen him so alive. He flashed me the excited grin of a little boy on his birthday, then dashed off the stage, probably worried he was taking up too much of our time. I turned back to the audience. “I seem to have misplaced my band, has anyone seen them?”

Countless arms rose, pointing. I turned to see the lights tracking Gil and Mick, who walked to their respective places, Mick handing me my guitar and Gil sitting at his set, which until now had been hidden by darkness. “Ah, there they are.” I shouldered the guitar strap and asked, “So, how is everybody tonight?”

A nails-on-chalkboard voice broke through the shouts: _“I’LL DIE IF YOU SPLIT UP!”_

I nodded. “I shared your mindset a week ago but since then I’ve come around. You’ll be alright, love.” I held up a hand to keep them from freaking out too much. “But yes, this will be the last album we do. I apologize to anyone who wanted to be here and couldn’t. If all goes as planned, you’ll be able to watch it online to your black hearts’ content.”

That made them applaud, but a few people booed. I glanced at Mick, who shrugged, smiling. It was a smile he’d given me in dozens of shows, a smile that said: _Trouble? Nah. Let’s go._ I smiled back, then turned so I could exchange that same smile with Gil, and then looked out to our man-made sea of angsty teenagers. “So, I wrote a new song. Wanna hear it?”

Rhetorical question, but you better believe they answered.

 

* * *

 

After about twenty minutes, we took a breather. I could’ve downed a whole bottle of water—as I’d assured Bas, there was no shortage of warmth in this building, and definitely not inside these leather clothes—but I made myself take calm, small sips. Partly because it wasn’t advisable to chug fluids during exercise, and partly because I wasn’t kidding when I said these fucking pants weren’t coming off. I might have been getting mature, but I wasn’t so old I couldn’t make it through a bloody concert.

Mick and Gil were still enjoying their break, so I addressed the audience with a groan that had the closest girls vibrating with hysteria. They were probably only fifteen, those girls, sixteen at the most, and their infatuation just brought that old refrain into my head: _if you knew what you had to put up with to hear me moan, you wouldn’t be so excited._ But I wasn’t going to ruin any more dreams than I had to tonight, so I didn’t bring that up. Instead, I said, “None of you can comprehend how tight these pants are.”

Laughter, wails, whistles. Some guy yelled, “I’ll take ’em off for you!”

I grinned, which just brought more screams out of that horny monster of a crowd. “I’d like to see you try.”

“Don’t tempt them,” Mikkel called to me; even ten feet away, he had to raise his voice to be heard. I’d offered he and Gil mics, but they didn’t want them. I’d always been the voice of us, and tonight we were saying farewell. That, I could say for all three.

“Mick says if he can’t have me, none of you can,” I told the crowd, setting down my bottle of water and stifling laughter when the fangirls lost it and Mikkel swore at me. Then, as I was straightening back up, something flew past in the corner of my eye. My immediate thought was _Oh great, people are throwing shit, that’s a great way to get a show cancelled._ But Gil was laughing, and upon closer inspection I realized what the projectile was. I turned back to the crowd with a pink, lacy bra in my hand. “Well, first of all, thank you. We’re honored by this gift.” Guffaws from the crowd; I suspected there were some young teenage boys in the house. “Unfortunately, now I have to do this. Ahem.” I got so close I was almost eating the mic and said in a low voice, “This is my serious legal voice warning you all that security doesn’t like when people throw things onto stages. So please don’t do that anymore. Thank you.” Then I held the bra to my chest—uproars of hilarity—and backed up to Mikkel. “Do me up, Daddy.”

I felt bad for the throats of those fangirls. It was bad enough when Mick actually fastened the bra around me, but when Gil beat out the gleeful opening of _Pretty Boy_? And when all three of us did our best school girl giggles? And I included a brief recreation of some of the noises they hadn’t gotten to hear me make last night?

_Fucking ballistic._

 

* * *

 

A show was a show was a show. No matter how emotionally meaningful it was to all of us, by the end of it, we were getting tired. I was actually relieved by how relieved I was; if I was clawing my way back onstage at the end of all this, that defeated the purpose. But no, I was glad this was ending. I was glad that soon I’d get off this stage and be able to sit down at a signing table for a while, and I’d be able to trade these pants for skinny jeans without leather involved, and I’d be able to wipe the sweat off my face and neck and hands. But that would have to wait. Because there was one last song to sing.

When I took Black Beauty off my shoulder, I waved at the crowd before they could cry out. “Don’t worry, I’m just trading her in for an old friend.” Out ran Bas, to take the black guitar and sling the old beat-to-shit Union Jack guitar across my shoulder instead. He had a towel in his hand too, and he patted my forehead, smiling at me. I said breathlessly, “Cheers,” even though my hair was still dripping. He kissed my temple, then retreated back into the darkness. _I’ll join you, darling,_ I thought. _Once I finish this._

I adjusted the mic, realizing only when I used the muscles in my arms how weak all of me was. My legs were trembling, just a little. Exhausted muscles, from standing planted and from prancing around like an idiot. _Finish this._ Sebastião was listening. Marianne was listening. Everyone was listening.

In a tone I had yet to use all evening, I said, “This is the last song.”

The crowd was, for once, quiet.

“It’s kind of two songs in one. It’s about saying goodbye. And it’s called _Lovesick_.”

With that, we roared into a song that opened harder and louder than any song we’d ever written. Thrashing, crashing, relentless drums and guitar. When my vocals came in, they were a punch in the heart, bitter and vengeful.

_Once you said you needed me_

_That my love was your fix_

_But it turns out your soul is clean_

_And I’m the real addict_

_Now the doctor writes my love notes_

_Signs them all lovesick_

The drums pounded, again and again and again, a firing squad. My voice bit through; it would swarm from left to right in their ears at home, haunting them like the damned on the other side of the guns.

_I’m just a symptom_

_Got your shot?_

_I’m just your victim_

The guitar sang out now, wailing in pain, keening high in suffering, and my voice went right with it. Oh, it hurt. I’d healed, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have phantom pain.

_And you used to say_

_That we were fate_

_Now all there’s left to say is_

_Do not resuscitate!_

It hurt. It had hurt, and it did hurt. I hung my head as the guitar cut out, letting those drums destroy everything inside me until I remembered how empty I had felt all those nights, and that last night especially, when I lost everything. Never again. My voice curled, lilting, twisted.

_Time for a checkup_

_Let’s find the fatal flaw_

_Spread your legs, open wide_

_I’ll make you say AAH!_

I tipped my head back to scream the last, still strumming like someone else was in control of my limbs, a dark puppet in the spotlight.

_No coming back, it’s too fucking late_

_I hope I keep you up at night_

_While I self-medicate!_

I could barely even hear myself over the screams of the faceless people in front of me.

_I’M NOT A HERO_

It was a war; here was Arthur Kirkland undone, screaming his throat out.

_I’M NOT A LEADER_

_I’M NOT A MAN_

The drums and guitar swelled with fury, so loud you thought they would never end, rising and rising even though it was impossible for them to go any higher—

_I’M JUST A FAILURE_

Silence.

The lights dropped. Darkness over the audience. Only three spotlights, one for each of us onstage.

I wasn’t singing to her. I wasn’t singing to him.

I’d been singing to myself, to the part of myself I was cutting out so the rest could grow.

But now I turned around. I turned my back on the fans, and instead faced Mick and Gil. Their eyes widened; I hadn’t done this in rehearsal. But I was doing it, and we were playing the song, so Gil started up the drums, a quiet, simple beat to bring us back. Mick’s bass carved the path, quiet as well. I didn’t strum. I didn’t even sing. I was the quietest instrument of all.

_But I admit it_

I smiled, a little; Rehab Lady would be proud.

_And that’s step one_

Getting louder, now. Gil and Mick smiling at me, my brothers.

_I’m working on it_

In the corner of my eye, I saw Bas standing just offstage, smiling at me, too. My beloved.

_And the show_

I snuck him a grin. He winked at me.

_Goes_

Deep breath.

_OOOOONNNNNNN!_

C5, baby.

I whirled back to face the crowd and the lights blazed on and we slammed into the mightest chorus you’ve ever fucking seen. Gil’s drums thundered like wrathful gods and my Old Jack’s last fading notes were drowned out by the fans screaming and shrieking and _howling_ the whole goddamned building down.

I was shaking, could hardly breathe let alone speak, but I got it out: “Thank you.”

Then they dropped us into darkness, and I didn’t know how I was going to walk out of here without collapsing. There was only the deafening love of the fans and the silent, warm love of Mick and Gil and Bas all wrapping their arms around me, so I couldn’t have fallen if I tried.

 

* * *

 

 **AK:** _Is it on? Test, test._

 **BT:** _Arthur, please don’t touch that. It doesn’t belong to me._

 **AK:** _Why, Bjorn, I had no idea you were a blossoming petty thief._

 **BT:** _It belongs to the entertainment writer for the magazine. I didn’t realize, when I offered to record the interview for him, you would be so hyper._

 **AK:** _I’m not hyper, I’m just in a good mood. The album is out today._

 **BT:** _Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s been almost a month since your farewell concert. How did that go?_

 **AK:** _You were there. What did you think of it?_

 **BT:** _I can’t comment, this isn’t my piece._

 **AK:** _Sure you can. He can put your quote off to the side. Give us some headline material._

 **BT:** _It was loud._

 **AK:** _I’m glad you uphold accuracy in journalism so staunchly. Staunch. That word sounds naughty, but it’s not, have you noticed?_

 **BT:** _Are you always this horrible in interviews?_

 **AK:** _No, usually I’m much worse. I’m toning it down because you’re an ally._

 **BT:** _Technically you’re supposed to pretend you don’t know me._

 **AK:** _Oh, well then I’ll just go, I don’t talk to strangers—I’m just having a laugh, keep your face on._

 **BT:** _What do you think the future will be of your band’s members? What’s Gilbert up to?_

 **AK:** _Fighting crime, helping elderly women cross the street, that sort of thing. Can’t talk about it, top secret. But I’ve been given permission to disclose that he is dating someone. So, my apologies to any albino fetishists out there._

 **BT:** _What about Mikkel?_

 **AK:** _Wouldn’t you like to know._

 **BT:** _Arthur._

 **AK:** _Oh, he’s getting married to a . . . a really nice guy._

 **BT:** _. . ._

 **AK:** _. . . But you didn’t hear that from me._

 **BT:** _No, of course not. And what about yourself? I understand several bands have approached you to do vocals or guitar for them?_

 **AK:** _Yeah, but I’m not interested. Flattered, I guess. But I’m retired._

 **BT:** _But not retired from music entirely?_

 **AK:** _I’d have to go deaf to retire from music entirely. And even then, I could still do it, maybe. That Austrian bloke did it._

 **BT:** _He was German, not Austrian._

 **AK:** _Was he really? Damn it. I gave Roderich credit by accident._

 **BT:** _You recently collaborated with Mr. Edelstein, didn’t you?_

 **AK:** _Yep. Well, I didn’t, technically. Sebastião did. As part of his new album. Which, déjà vu, comes out today._

 **BT:** _You have a producing credit on his album, is that right?_

 **AK:** _That is right. Can I do promotions here? Buy it buy it buy it._

 **BT:** _Last question._

 **AK:** _Bless your heart._

 **BT:** _I’m sure everyone wants to know how things are going with you and Sebastião._

 **AK:** _We just made an album together._

 **BT:** _I was thinking something a little more personal._

 **AK:** _Well, last night we [redacted]._

 **BT:** _. . . Slightly less personal, Arthur._

 **AK:** _What do you want from me? He’s not pregnant, if that’s what you’re wondering. We’ve been thinking about getting a cat._

 **BT:** _A cat? Not a dog?_

 **AK:** _We already had a dog. Big blond galumphing thing. But we gave him up for adoption._

 **BT:** _Oh?_

 **AK:** _He lives with a Russian lady, now. He’s happy. Cats are less work, though. That’s what we were thinking. But they have claws so we’d have to get rid of the water bed, which would be a shame. Have you ever [expletive removed] on a water bed, Bjorn? I mean, interviewer I don’t know?_

 **BT:** _That’s all the time we have, I’m afraid._

 **AK:** _Just when I was starting to enjoy myself. Adulthood is such a pisstake._

 **BT:** _Any parting words, Mr. Kirkland?_

 **AK:** _Thanks for listening._

 

_The End._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you were curious:
> 
> https://youtu.be/kws7lvBXiTE
> 
> There's a male vocalist version but this one is cooler, and we all know Punk!England is a queen anyway ;)


End file.
